Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  “And I found a new and more enduring type of enchantment in Maeve, and I stayed. . . .”

  “What happened to the cloch, Da?” Jenna asked. “How did you lose it on Knobtop?” The phantom of her father glanced up from his chair, where he seemed to have fallen into a reverie after his tale. He shrugged.

  “I lost it, or it lost me,” he said. “I don’t know which. I wore the necklace all the time. I walked often on Knobtop while in Ballintubber—I seemed to be drawn to the mountain, or perhaps it was the cloch that drew me there. After I married your mam, I’d take the flock up there nearly every day. One night, not a month after we married, I returned from grazing them there, and when I took off my shirt that night, I saw that the silver cage that had held the stone was empty. The wires holding the stone had moved apart enough for it to fall through. I looked for the stone for the next year, almost every day, combing the ground while the sheep grazed. I never found it. But I know if I’d seen the mage-lights over Knobtop, I’d have come running. But from what you’ve said, it seems I never had the chance.” He seemed distraught and upset. “I wonder,” he said finally. “I wonder if the cloch did it all: brought itself to Knobtop because it knew that the mage-lights would come there, pulled itself away from me so it could stay there. Or maybe that was just all coincidence. Maybe the mage-lights would have found the cloch wherever it was. I don’t know.”

  As her da talked, Jenna became aware of light moving against the walls, colorful, swirling bands. She glanced at the balcony door; outside, the night sky was alive with the mage-lights, sheets of brilliance flowing as if in some unseen wind, dancing above her. “Da!” she cried. “There! Can you see them? Da?” She looked behind; he was gone. The wraith had vanished.

  The cloch called to her, still in her hand from when she had shown it to her father’s spirit. Jenna went out onto the balcony, into the chill night, into the blazing shower of hues and shades. She lifted the cloch to the sky, and the mage lights coalesced like iron filings drawn by a lodestone. She could hear people in the streets below, shouting and calling and pointing to the sky and to the tower on which she stood, and behind her, her mam and Mac Ard hurried into her room.

  “Jenna!” Maeve called, but Jenna didn’t turn.

  The first whirling tendril of the mage-lights had closed around her hand and the cloch, and the freezing touch seeped into the patterns etched in the flesh of her arm: as Maeve and Mac Ard rushed toward her and stopped at the balcony doors; as the people below exclaimed and gestured toward her; as the mage-lights enveloped her, encased her in color as energy poured from the sky into Lámh Sháb hála; as Jenna screamed with pain but also with a sense of relief and satisfaction, as if the filling of the cloch’s reservoirs of power also fulfilled a need in herself she hadn’t known existed. She clenched her fist tight around the stone while billows of light fell from the sky and swept through and into her, as she and Lámh Shábhála shouted affirmation back to them.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. The sky went dark; Jenna fell to her knees, gasping, holding the stone against her breast. Lámh Shábhála was open in her mind, a sparkling matrix of lattices, the reservoir of power at its core stronger now, though not yet nearly full. That would come, she knew. Soon. Very soon.

  “Jenna!” Her mam sank to the balcony floor in front of her, hands clutching Jenna’s shoulders. “Jenna, are you all right?” Jenna looked up, seeing her through the matrix of the stone. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She blinked, and Lámh Shábhála receded in her sight. The full agony of the mage-lights was beginning now, but she would not lose consciousness this time.

  She was stronger. She could bear this.

  “Help me up,” she said, and felt Maeve and Mac Ard lift her to her feet. She stood, cradling her right arm to her. She shrugged the hands away, and took a few wobbling steps back into her room, with the tiarna and her mam close beside her. She sat on the edge of her bed, as her mam bustled about, shouting to the servant to bring boiling water and the andúilleaf paste. Mac Ard knelt in front of her, reaching out as if to touch her arm. Jenna drew back, scowling.

  “It wanted me, not you,” she told him. “It’s mine now, and I won’t let you have it. I won’t ever let you have it.”

  She wasn’t sure what she saw in his eyes then. “I’m sorry, Padraic,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just the pain.”

  He stared at her for long seconds, then he nodded. “I’m not a danger to you, Jenna,” he said, his voice low enough so that only Jenna could hear him. “But there are others who will be. You’ll find that out soon enough.” He stood then.

  “I leave her to you, Maeve,” he said, more loudly. “I’ll send for the healer. But I doubt that he has anything that will help her now.”

  PART TWO

  FILLEADH

  16

  Lár Bhaile

  IF Áth Iseal felt large and crowded to Jenna, Lár Bhaile was immense beyond comprehension. The city spread along the southeastern arm of Lough Lár, filling the hollows of the hills and rising on the green flanks of Goat Fell, a large, steep-sloped mountain that marked the end of the lough. Along the summit of Goat Fell ran the stone ram parts of the Rí’s Keep, twin walls a hundred yards apart, opening into a wide courtyard where the keep itself stood, towering high above the city. Behind those walls lived Rí Gabair, whose birth name was Torin Mallaghan, in his court with the Riocha of Tuath Gabair gathered around him.

  Jenna could well imagine how Tiarna Mac Ard could have seen the mage-lights over Ballintubber from those heights, flickering off the night-clad waters of the lough.

  She looked up those heights now from the market in what was called Low Town along the lake’s shore, and they seemed impossibly high, a distant aerie of cut granite and limestone. Jenna judged that it had taken her at least a candle stripe and a half to ride down from the heights in Tiarna Mac Ard’s carriage; it would take two or more to wend their way back up the narrow road that wound over the face of Goat Fell.

  But that was for later. Now was the time for business.

  Jenna glanced at the trio of burly soldiers who accompanied her. Neither the Rí nor Tiarna Mac Ard would allow her to leave the keep alone. At first, she hadn’t minded, not after the escape from Ballintubber. But in the intervening two months, the initial feeling of safety had been replaced by a sense of stifling confinement. She was never alone, not even in the rooms the Rí had arranged for her at the keep—there were always gardai stationed outside the door and servants waiting just out of sight for a summons. The cage in which she found herself was jeweled and golden, plush and comfortable, but it was nonetheless a cage.

  “For your own safety,” they told her. “For your protection.”

  But she knew it wasn’t for her protection. It was for the protection of the cloch.

  Since she’d been in Lár Bhaile, the mage-lights had appeared here a dozen times. Each time, they had called her; each time, she had answered the call, letting their power fill the cloch she carried, now encased in a silver cage necklace around her neck, as it had been once for her da. Soon, she knew, the well within Lámh Shábhála would be filled to overflowing and the stone would open the way to the mage-lights for the other clochs. Everyone else knew it, also, for she saw that the Riocha were gathering here in Lár Bhaile, and many of them wore stones that had been in their families for generations, stones that were reputed to be clochs na thintrí. They waited. They smiled at her the way a wolf might smile at an injured doe.

  The Alds had been consulted, old records pored over, tales and legends recalled. They knew now that Jenna held Lámh Shábhála, and they also knew the pain the First Holder must endure when Lámh Shábhála opened the rest of the clochs na thintrí to the mage-lights. They seemed content to let Jenna be the First Holder.

  She thought most of them also imagined themselves the Second Holder, though at least Padraic Mac Ard didn’t seem to be among them. Wherever she went, there were eyes watching, and she knew that the gardai whispered
back to the Riocha.

  Jenna could sense that the gardai didn’t like where she’d brought them. They scowled, and kept their hands close to the hilts of their swords. The four of them were at the end of the market square; the stalls were small and dingy and the crowds thin. Just beyond, a narrow lane moved south: Cat’s Alley, where the houses seemed to lean toward each other in a drunken embrace, leaving the cobbled lane in perpetual twilight. The central gutter was foul with black pools of stagnant water edged with filthy ice, and a frozen reek of decay and filth welled out into the square from the open mouth of the lane. Jenna grimaced: this was where Aoife, the servant she trusted most, had told her that she would find a man named du Val, who kept potions.

  “Back in Ballintubber,” she’d told Aoife, “we had a woman who gathered herbs and knew the old ways. You know, plants that can cure headaches, or can keep a young woman from getting pregnant, things like that. Where would I find someone like that here?”

  Aoife had smiled knowingly at Jenna. “I do know, mistress,” she said. “Down in Cat’s Alley, no more than fifty strides from where it meets Low Town Market. You’ll see the sign on your right.”

  Jenna counted the steps, trying to avoid the worst of the muck on the ground. Before she reached forty, she saw the weathered board with faded letters: Du Val, Apothecary & Herbalist. She couldn’t read the words, but the tutors Tiarna Mac Ard had assigned to her had taught her the letters and she could compare then with the note Aoife had given her. “Stay here,” she told her escorts.

  “Mistress, our orders . . .”

  She’d learned quickly how to deal with the objections of gardai. “Stay here, or I’ll tell the Rí that you lost me in the market. Would you rather deal with that? I’ll be careful. You can stay at the door and watch me, if you’d like.” Her words emerged in puffs of white vapor; she wrapped her clóca tightly around her. “The sooner I’m done here, the sooner we can get back to the keep and some warmth.”

  They glanced at each other, then shrugged. Jenna pushed open the door. A bell jingled above. In the wedge of pale light that came in through the open door, she saw a small, windowless room. The walls were lined with shelves, all of them stuffed with vials of glass and crockery. Ahead of her was a desk piled high with more jars, and beyond into dim shadows were cabinets and cubbyholes. There was a fireplace to the right, but the ashes looked cold and dead. “Hello?” Jenna called, shivering.

  Shadows moved in the darkness, and Jenna heard the sound of slow footsteps descending a staircase behind a jumble of boxes and crates. A short dwarf of a man peered out toward her, squinting, a hand over his eyebrows. “Shut the door,” he barked. “Are you trying to blind me?”

  “Shut it,” Jenna told the garda, then when he hesitated, added more sharply, “do it!”

  The door closed behind her, and as Jenna’s eyes adjusted, she saw that some light filtered in through cracks in the doors and shutters, and that candles were lit here and there along the shelves. The little man shuffled forward to the desk with an odd, rolling gait. He was dressed in a dingy, shapeless woolen tunic and pants, held together with a simple rope. His face reminded her a bit of Seancoim’s—the same bony ridge along the eyebrows, the flattened face. She wondered if there wasn’t Bunús Muintir heritage in him somewhere. He glanced up and down at her appraisingly. “What can I do for you, Bantiarna?” he asked.

  “Are you du Val?” He sniffed. Jenna took that for an affirmative answer.

  “I’m looking for a certain herb that none of the healers in the keep seem to know,” she told him. “I was told that you might have it.”

  “The healers know shite,” du Val spat. “They forget the lore their ancestors knew. What are you looking for?”

  “Anduilleaf.”

  Du Val said nothing. He came from behind the desk and stood in front of her. He was no taller than her chest. He stared up at her face, then let his gaze travel over her body. He saw the cloth wrapped carefully around her right arm and took her arm in his hands. Jenna didn’t protest as he unknotted the cloth strip and rolled it back. When her hand was exposed past the wrist, he turned it over and back, examining the skin with its mottled, scarred patterns. Then, with stubby hands that were surprisingly graceful, he wrapped the arm again.

  “So you’re the one? The one who calls the mage-lights?” Jenna didn’t answer. Du Val sniffed. “You don’t have to tell me; I can look at your arm and see it. I’ve seen the mage-lights swirling around the keep and heard about the young figure that stands on the keep’s summit at their bid ding and swallows them. I’ve heard the name Lámh Sháb hála bandied about. I’ve heard the rumors, little ones and big ones, and I know more about the truth of them than some of the Riocha up in the keep. I’ve seen the Riocha come to Lár Bhaile all of a sudden with bright stones around their necks, and I know that the eye of the Rí Ard in Dún Laoghaire looks this way as well, and he’s also very interested in what’s going on. And the goons outside—I suppose they’re here to protect you and stop me from taking the cloch from you.”

  Jenna felt a shiver not born of cold run through her. “They’re fast and strong, well-armed and mean, and they will kill you if you so much as scratch me,” she told du Val. He seemed unimpressed. He scratched his side.

  “Vermin,” he said. “You can’t get rid of them. Not here in their natural habitat: the city. How long have you been taking the leaf?”

  “Almost two months now.”

  “Regularly?”

  “Almost every day.” In truth, it was every day. Sometimes twice. On the really bad days, the days after the mage-lights, even more. Du Val stroked his chin.

  “You know that andúilleaf’s addictive?”

  Jenna shrugged. “It takes away the pain.”

  “So it does, so it does—though your healers would tell you that the leaf has no known pharmacological properties, if they recognize the herb at all. They wouldn’t know where to find it, wouldn’t notice it growing. That knowledge’s lost to them. The Old Ones knew, the Bunús Muintir. The few of them who are still around know, too. They also know how careful you have to be with the leaf, if you don’t want to end up needing it forever.”

  “If you’re planning to talk me to death, I’ll go elsewhere,” Jenna told him, speaking to him in the tone she’d heard the bantiarnas use with their servants. “I have another source.” She turned to go, hoping the bluff would work. She could feel tears welling up behind her eyes and knew that she couldn’t hold them back once she closed the door behind her, no matter what the gardai might think. She was scared: lost in the need for the relief from pain the herb brought, lost in a level of society she didn’t understand. There was no “other source”—she had no idea how she could find Seancoim again, or how she would find her way to Doire Coill without having to explain it to the Rí and Mac Ard.

  “All right,” du Val grunted behind her, and she wiped surreptitiously at her eyes before turning back to him. “I have the leaf. ’Tis expensive.” He almost seemed to laugh. “But considering who you are, that’s probably not a consideration, is it? Who else knows you’re dependent on it?” When she didn’t answer, he did laugh, a snorting amusement that twisted his swarthy, broad face. “If you’re afraid that I’ll use the information to blackmail you, forget it. You have worse worries than that.”

  He went to the back of the room, rummaging around in the shadowy recesses of a leaning, bowed case of shelving. He returned with a glass jar half-filled with brown leaves. “This is all I have,” he said. “ ’Tis old, but still potent.” Jenna reached for the jar, and du Val pulled it back to his chest, scowling up at her. “First, it’s two mórceints.”

  “Two mórceints?” Jenna couldn’t keep the shock from her voice. Two mórceints was more than a good craftsman made in a year. Back in Ballintubber, that might have been more money than the entire village together saw in the same time.

  “Two mórceints,” he repeated. “And don’t be complaining. There’s few enough of us who would even know ho
w and where to find this, and it grows in only one place anywhere near here.”

  “Doire Coill,” Jenna said.

  If du Val was surprised by her knowledge, he didn’t show it. “Aye,” he said. “The dark forest itself, and only in spe cial places there. Two mórceints,” he repeated, “or you can check your ‘other source.’ ” He smiled at her, with black holes where several teeth should have been.

  “All right,” she said. She fumbled in the pouch she carried. At least Tiarna Mac Ard wasn’t stingy with his money; she had the two mórceints and more. She counted out the coins into du Val’s grimy, callused palm, then reached again for the jar. He wouldn’t release it.

  “Does someone know you’re taking this?” he asked again.

  “Aye,” she answered. “My mam.” It was a lie. The truth was that no one knew, unless Aoife suspected it.

  He nodded. “Then tell your mam this: take the leaf no more than once a day, and for no longer than a month. Start with four leaves in the brew; cut the dosage by one leaf every week, or you’ll be back here again in another month, and the price will be four mórceints. Do you understand that?”

  “Aye,” Jenna answered.

  With the word, du Val released the jar and closed his fingers around the coins. He jingled them appreciatively. “A pleasure doing business with you, Holder.”

  “I’m certain it was.”

  He snorted laughter again. “I’ll see you again in a month.”