Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  You look on the remains of Eilís MacGairbhith of Inish Thuaidh, and I was once the Holder of Lámh Shábhála, as you are now. . . .

  The voice was as liquid as the falls, and it sounded inside her head. Jenna stepped back, her hands to her mouth, until she felt the roar of the water at her back. “No,” she said aloud. “Be quiet. I don’t hear you.”

  A laugh answered her. The skeleton stared. Take one of my rings, the voice said. Place it on your own finger . . .

  “No. I can’t.”

  You must . . . The voice was a bare whisper, fading into wind and the falls’ louder voice. For a moment, Jenna thought it had gone entirely, then it returned, a husk. . . . please . . . one of the rings . . .

  Her hand trembling, Jenna stepped toward the body again and reached out to the hands crossed over the breast. She touched the nearest ring, gasping, then pulled back as the golden band wobbled on the bones. Taking a breath, she reached out again, and this time pulled the ring from the unresisting hand. She held it in her fingers, turning it: the ring was heavy gold, inset with small emerald stones, fili greed and decorated with knotted rope patterns—an uncommon piece of jewelry, crafted by a master. The ring of someone who was once wealthy or well-rewarded.

  She put the ring on her own finger.

  At first nothing changed. Then Jenna realized that the hollow seemed brighter, that she could see as if it were full day. A bright fog filled the recess and the sound of the falls receded and died to nothing.

  A woman, clad in the green silk that the skeleton had worn, stepped through the mist toward Jenna.

  Her hair was long and golden-red like bright, burnished copper, and her skin was fair. Her eyes were summer blue, and she smiled as she came forward, her hands held out to Jenna. The sleeves left her arms bare, and Jenna saw that her right hand was scarred and marked to the elbow with swirling patterns, patterns that matched those on Jenna’s own hand and arm.

  On one of her fingers sat the same ring Jenna wore.

  “Eilís,” Jenna breathed, and the woman laughed.

  “Aye,” she said. “That was once my name. So you’re the new Holder, and so young to be a First. That’s a pity.” Her hand touched Jenna’s, and with the touch, Jenna felt a touch in her head as well, as if somehow Eilís were prowling in her thoughts. “Ah . . . Jenna, is it? And you’ve met Riata.”

  Jenna nodded. “How . . . ?” she began.

  “You are the Holder,” Eilís said again. “This is just one of the gifts and dangers that Lámh Shábhála bestows: the Holders before you—we who held Lámh Shábhála while it was awake and perhaps even some of those who held it while it slept—live within the stone also.” Jenna remembered the red-haired man she’d glimpsed when she first picked up the stone. Had he been a Holder, once? “At least,” Eilís continued, “some shade of us does. Come to where a Holder’s body rests, or touch something that was once theirs, and they can speak with you if you will it. They will also know what is in your mind, if you allow it to be open. Tell me, when you met Riata, did he give you a token?”

  Jenna shook her head. “No. He only spoke to me.”

  Eilís nodded at that, as if it were the answer she expected. “I met him, too. Riata prefers to be left alone in death. He knows that should you need him again, you can find him in the stone or go to where he rests. I went there once, myself. That’s how I came to know him—a wise man, wiser than most of us Daoine believed possible of a Bunús Muintir. We’re an arrogant people . . .” She seemed to sigh, then, and looked past Jenna as if into some hazy distance. “He told me I would die, if I followed my heart. I didn’t believe him.” Another sigh, and her attention came back to Jenna. “You will meet the shades of other Holders, inevitably, especially if you go to Lár Bhaile as you intend. And I’ll warn you; some you will not like and they will not like you. Some will smile and seem fair, but their advice will be as rotten as their hearts. The dead, you see, are not always sane.” She smiled as she said that, a strange expression on her face. “Be careful.”

  “Why didn’t Riata tell me this?” Jenna asked. “There’s so much I need to know.”

  “If he told you all, you would have despaired,” Eilís answered. “You’re new to Lámh Shábhála, and you are a First besides.” She shuddered. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be a First.”

  “Riata . . . he said that the stone was a curse, especially for the First.”

  “He was right.”

  Jenna shuddered. “That scares me, the way you say the words.”

  Her gaze was calm. “Then you’re wise.”

  “Is the cloch evil, then?”

  Eilís laughed, a sound like trickling water. “Lámh Shábhála—or any of the clochs na thintrí, for that matter—don’t know good or evil, child. They simply are. They give power, and power can be put to whatever use a Holder wishes. Lámh Shábhála is First and Last, and so the power it can lend is also greatest. As to evil . . .” A smile. “You bring to the stone what you have inside you, that’s all. In any case, evil depends on which side you stand—what one person calls evil, another calls justice. Let me see it,” she said. “Let me see Lámh Shábhála again.”

  Jenna felt reluctant. She shook her head, the barest mo tion, and Eilís frowned, taking a step forward. “I mean you no harm, Jenna,” she said. “Let me see the cloch I once wielded myself.”

  Jenna felt for the stone, closing her fingers around it through the cloth that hid it. “If Lámh Shábhála has the greatest power of all the clochs, how was it taken from you?”

  Eilís’ laugh was bitter now. “I said its power was greatest, but even the strongest can be overpowered by numbers or make a fatal mistake. Lámh Shábhála is chief among the Clochs Mór, the major clochs, but there are others that are nearly as powerful. Three of the Clochs Mór were arrayed against me, and I was isolated. Betrayed by . . .” She scowled, her face harsh. “. . . my own stupidity. By listening to my heart, as Riata said it would be. And so I died. He laid me here, the new Holder, the one who had betrayed me: Aodhfin Ó Liathain. My lover. He placed me here after he killed me and took Lámh Shábhála for himself. He kissed my cold lips with tears in his eyes. If you should happen to meet him through the cloch, tell him that I still curse his name and the night I first gave myself to him.” Another step, and Eilís’ hand reached out toward Jenna. “My cloch. Let me see it once more.”

  Shaking her head, Jenna backed up again. She wasn’t certain why she felt this reluctance—perhaps the harsh ea gerness in Eilís’ features, or the way she had referred to the stone as hers. But Jenna felt a compulsion to keep the stone hidden—too many people had asked to see it already. Eilís took another step closer, and again Jenna retreated. There was a strange yet familiar roaring behind her. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, but there was nothing there, only the white-lit, ethereal fog. She could feel Eilís touching her memories again, and she tried to close her mind to the intrusion. The ghost laughed at her effort. “You’re indeed young and unpracticed,” she said. “So much to learn . . .” Her voice was honey and perfume. “I know your mind. You showed Riata the stone, didn’t you? And Seancoim and that tiarna with you. Why not me?”

  Jenna, reluctantly, reached beneath her clothing and pulled out the stone. “Here,” she said to Eilís. “Here it is.”

  Eilís stared at the cloch, a hand at her breast as if she were having difficulty breathing. “Aye,” she whispered.

  “That is Lámh Shábhála. And you don’t know yet how to use it.”

  Jenna shook her head. “No. Can you tell me?”

  “I can’t,” she answered, but then her eyes narrowed. “Or perhaps I can. Let me hold it. Give it to me . . .” She stretched her arm out.

  “No.” Jenna closed her fingers around the cloch, fisting it in her right hand.

  “Give it to me . . .” Eilís said again. Her hand came closer, and Jenna took a final step backward.

  Cold water hammered at Jenna’s head and shoulders, driving her backward. The falls
tore her away from the ledge and bore her under even as she screamed. She felt herself flung downward with the water, and she knew she was dead.

  In that instant, the cloch burned in her hand, and she felt it open to her, as if she became part of the stone itself, her mind whirling with the patterns on her hand, with the identical patterns of the cloch, with the energy locked within it borrowed from the mage-lights. This was different than when she had unleashed lightning on Knobtop or when she had killed the soldiers. Then, there had been no conscious thought involved. This time, she felt herself will the cloch to release its energy, and it answered. The water of the Duán still pounded at her, unrelenting and merciless, but she was no longer falling . . .

  Now you know . . . Eilís’ voice whispered in her head.

  Now you know ...

  Somehow, impossibly, Jenna was standing on the grass above the falls, in the sunlight. The cloch was no longer in her hand. There was no ring on her finger. She felt at the waist of her skirt: there it was, the familiar lump of cloch, and circular hardness alongside it: Eilís’ ring.

  Someone was crying, weeping in pain, and she realized it was her.

  “Jenna! There you are! We’ve been calling . . . By the Mother-Creator, girl, you’re soaked through! What’s the matter?” Maeve came running up to her. Jenna sank into her embrace.

  “My arm . . .” she cried. “It hurts so much, Mam.” Sharp, red agony stabbed at her, radiating from her hand downward and into her chest. She shivered with cold, the wind biting at her drenched clothing. Her vision was colored with it, like a veil over her eyes. With Jenna leaning against her mother, they moved down away from the falls. As they turned, Jenna glanced down.

  The falls flared white as the water cascaded over the edge of the ravine, and the mist touched her face like tears.

  13

  Smoke and Ruin

  A STRIPE later, new wrappings with Seancoim’s poul tice slathered on the cloth and a mug of the andúilleaf brew had dulled the pain enough so that Jenna could ride. The wan fall sun had dried her clothes somewhat. She told the others that she’d slipped and fallen on the arm—the story appeared to satisfy them, and if she seemed wetter than the mist alone could have managed, no one mentioned the fact.

  It was nearing midafternoon when they returned to the High Road. “A long lunch,” Mac Ard said worriedly when they finally were riding north again. “It will be dark before we reach the ford at this rate. We still may not reach Áth Iseal tonight.”

  Jenna was silent on the ride. Again Mac Ard and Maeve rode together, and O’Deoradhain remained behind with Jenna, but his attempts to draw her into conversation failed. In truth, she barely heard him or saw the landscape as they approached the ford of the Duán. She held the reins of the horse loosely in her left hand, trusting the mare to keep to the road, and stared down at her bandaged arm, letting the fingers stretch and close, stretch and close. She traced the patterns of the scars with her gaze, feeling them even though they were hidden under folds of cotton.

  Her thoughts were on Lámh Shábhála. The other times she had tapped the stone’s power, she had felt no control of the process. But now . . . Even without holding the stone, she could touch it with her mind, as if she and the cloch were linked. She could place her thoughts there and imagine herself sinking into the unguessed depths of the cloch. She could see power flaring between the crystalline structures within the stone, and she could direct that force: she could send it flaring outward and control where it went, what it touched, what it did.

  And she could see, at the center of the stone, a hidden well of another power, one that was as yet half-filled, and when she looked there with her mind, she could feel gossa mer, invisible threads running away from Lámh Shábhála into the world. At the end of those threads, she knew, lay the other clochs na thintrí, the stones of lightning, waiting for Lámh Shábhála to restore their power.

  She could not imagine how she would handle that huge reservoir, if the energy that already ran through Lámh Shábhála hurt her so much already. At the same time, she knew that she could not throw the stone away or give it to someone else. Lámh Shábhála wouldn’t allow that. She would not allow it. Even contemplating that action made her arm throb through the veil of andúilleaf. She had opened the stone, but Lámh Shábhála had also opened her.

  She could no more easily abandon the cloch now than she could discard her heart.

  “I don’t know how Tiarna Mac Ard feels,” she heard O’Deoradháin saying though her musings, “but I don’t like this. There’s been no one on the road with us all day. The west isn’t as well traveled as the east side of the lough, but still we should have seen a few others by now. Actually, I was surprised no other travelers stopped at the falls in all the time we were there.”

  Jenna nodded. She might have glanced at him, but Lámh Shábhála overlaid the sight. He may have continued to talk, but she was lost inside the stone, peering at its secrets.

  By evening, with the sun sending long shadows eastward as it touched the treetops, they approached a crossroads where the lough road met with the High Road traveling up to Ballintubber and crossing over to the Duán. On either side of the road, oak trees overhung the stone fences; to the west, the outskirts of Doire Coill huddled close by across an overgrown field. Mac Ard suddenly pulled back on his reins to bring his horse to a halt, standing up in the stirrups and peering around them. “Can you smell that?” he asked.

  The question brought Jenna out of her reverie. She sniffed, and the smell brought with it unpleasant memories. “Woodsmoke,” she said, then frowned. “And something more.”

  “Too much woodsmoke,” Mac Ard commented. “And an awful reek within it. I was past here a dozen days ago, on my way to Ballintubber. Where the roads meet there was a tiny village: a tavern and three or four houses.” His face was touched with worry as he looked back over his shoulder. “And I share your concern about the quiet on the road, O’Deoradháin. I think we should ride carefully and slowly, and keep an eye about us. Jenna—”

  Jenna started at the sound of her name. “Aye, Tiarna?”

  “You should be most careful of all.” His dark gaze held her, moving from her face to her arm. “I think you understand my meaning.”

  She closed her fingers around the hidden cloch. “I do, Tiarna.”

  A nod. “O’Deoradháin, you and I should ride ahead, I think.”

  They rode on, Mac Ard and O’Deoradháin several feet ahead of them. Jenna noticed that the tiarna swept his clóca back away from the hilt of his sword and that she could also see the leather-wrapped hilt of O’Deoradháin’s knife. Alert now, they approached the crossing. The aroma of smoke hung in the air, and the odd scent underlying it grew stronger. The walls on either side of the road spread out suddenly, and in the clear space ahead of them, she could see a cluster of buildings. In the twilight, they seemed wrapped in a strange, dark fog, then she realized that the structures were roofless, the windows and doors gaping open like dead mouths, and that the fog was tendrils of smoke from still-smoldering timbers.

  The scene was eerily deserted. No people moved in the midst of the rubble, no birds, no dogs. Nothing.

  She also knew, then, what the other odor must be, and she swallowed hard. “The fires were set a day ago or more, by the look,” Mac Ard said, almost whispering. His face was grim. None of them wanted to speak loudly here; it seemed disrespectful. “That worries me—I didn’t think the Connachtans would stay this long, or be so bold as to strike this close to Áth Iseal with its garrison. Those who lived here no doubt fled, the ones who weren’t killed, but why they haven’t returned by now is what worries me more.”

  “Tuath Connachta, was it?” O’Deoradháin asked. “You speak as if you’ve met them, Tiarna. Are the Tuatha at war?”

  Mac Ard glanced back at O’Deoradháin but didn’t answer. “Let’s see what we can learn here. Carefully . . .”

  They moved closer to the ruins. Jenna could see now that all that was left of the houses w
ere the tumbled-down stone walls, blacked with smoke. A few fire-blistered timbers leaned forlornly, with wisps of gray smoke lifting from them. The ground was littered with broken crockery and scraps of cloth, as if the village had been torn apart before the fires were set. As if, Jenna realized, the attackers had been looking for someone or something. There were no signs of the residents of this place, though Jenna saw dark shapes within walls of the houses that made her look away.

  Mac Ard reined up his horse before the ruins of the largest building—the inn, Jenna decided. He walked carefully over the stones and timbers, his boots crunching through the wreckage and sending plumes of ash up with each step. Once, he stopped and bent down, then came back out.

  “There are two dead in there,” he said. “Maybe a few more that I can’t see. Some, perhaps most, I hope, ran before the fire and are still alive.” He looked around. “There’s nothing we can do here. I’ll feel safer once we reach Áth Iseal.”

  “If it hasn’t been attacked as well,” O’Deoradháin replied but Mac Ard shook his head.

  “There weren’t that many here, by the signs. A dozen, perhaps a few more. This is the work of marauders, not an army.”

  As Mac Ard spoke, Jenna closed her eyes for a moment. The cloch burned in the darkness behind her eyes, and she could see the webs of connection to the other clochs na thintrí. One of those connections, she suddenly realized, snaked over to Mac Ard, and another . . .

  She opened her eyes. Against the ruddy western sky, on a bare knife-edged ridge half a mile away, she could see a rider. “Tiarna,” she said, pointing, and as Mac Ard turned to look, the rider turned his horse and vanished. A faint voice called in the distance, and others answered. Mac Ard muttered a curse and mounted.