by S L Farrell
The horde had passed.
“Wind sprites,” O’Deoradháin said. His voice was hushed and awed, as if he were standing in one of the Mother-Creator’s chapels. Jenna looked at him in puzzlement. “My great-mam used to tell me tales at night, and she spoke of eyes in the dark, and horns, and the wind as they rushed by in their hunts. I thought the stories she told me were all legends and myths.”
He shook his head. “Now I think the legends were only sleeping.”
32
Ballintubber Changed
THE next morning, they walked up the High Road to the village. The morning was a drizzle of mist and fog that beaded on their clócas and hair, and the spring’s warmth seemed to have fled. As they approached, Jenna began to sense that something was wrong. It was the silence that bothered her. A Ballintubber morning should have been alive with sound: the lowing of milch cows in their barns; the steely clatter of a hammer on hot iron or bronze from the smithy; the creak and rumble of produce carts going out to the fields; the shouts and hollers of children; laughter, conversations, greetings . . .
There was nothing. She could see the buildings up the rise, but no sound wafted down from them to challenge the birdcalls or their footsteps on the muddy road. O’Deorad háin noticed it as well; he swept back his clóca and placed his hand on the hilt of his knife. “Perhaps they all decided to sleep late this morning,” he said, and gave a bitter laugh at his own jest.
“Not likely,” Jenna answered. Grimacing, she placed her right hand around the cloch. She opened the stone and let its energy flow outward, her own awareness drifting with it. O’Deoradháin had offered to teach her some of the craft of the cloudmage during their months in Doire Coill, and she had—grudgingly—accepted his tutelage. She wasn’t sure how good a pupil she’d been, suspicious of her teacher’s intentions and instruction, but she had learned a few skills. She could sense life in the way the power flowed, and that told her there were people nearby, though only a few.
And there was something else, at the edge of what she could detect: a pull and bending in her consciousness, as if another cloch were out there as well. She brought up the walls that O’Deoradháin had taught her to create around the cloch, but at that moment, the hint of another presence vanished. She put her attention there, to the south and east, but it was gone. Perhaps it had never been there at all.
She opened her hand and her eyes. A shiver of discomfort traveled from wrist to shoulder, and she groaned. “Jenna?”
“I’m fine,” she told O’Deoradháin sharply. “Come on; there’s no one there we need to be concerned with.” She began walking rapidly toward the cluster of buildings.
Things had changed. The High Road was marked with stone flags through the village, but grass grew high between the flat rocks. Dogs would usually have come running to greet newcomers, but the only dog Jenna glimpsed—black and white and painfully reminiscent of Kesh—was bedraggled and thin, skulking away with lowered tail and ears as soon as it caught a glimpse of them. The Mullin house, near the outskirts of the village, hadn’t been whitewashed this spring as Tom and his sons usually did, and the thatch roof sagged badly just over the doorway. The door hung on one hinge, half-opened and leading into a dark interior. “Hello,” Jenna called as they passed, but no one came out.
“Not the place you remember, is it?” O’Deoradháin ventured. “You’re certain there are people here?”
“Aye,” Jenna answered grimly. “Near the tavern, I think.”
“I’d be drinking if I lived here.”
Jenna gave him an irritated glance; he stared blandly back at her. Turning her back on the man, she walked quickly to Tara’s Tavern. The village square was overgrown and shabby, but peat smoke curled from the chimney of the inn and she could smell bacon frying. The stone steps leading up to the door were achingly familiar, and she pushed open the door and entered.
“By the Mother—Jenna?” Tara’s voice cut through the dimness inside, and the woman set down a tray of glasses with a clatter and a crash, and she came running from behind the bar. She stopped an arm’s length away from Jenna and looked her up and down, her mouth open. “Would you look at you—all dressed up in a Riocha’s clothes, and that silver chain around your neck.” Tara’s gaze snagged on Tara’s scarred right arm, and the mouth closed. Behind her, O’Deoradháin entered, and Tara took a step back. “You’ve . . . you’ve not changed a bit,” Tara finished, and Jenna smiled wanly at the obvious lie. “Sit down, sit down. You and your . . . companion take that table over there, or any you want. It’s not like we’re going to have a crowd, though once people hear that you’ve come back, I expect we’ll see as good a one as I’ve had all year. I have bacon going in the pan, and good eggs, and biscuits I just made this morning. I’ll get some tea for you . . . Sit . . .” Tara turned and scurried into the kitchen; Jenna shrugged at O’Deoradháin.
“It’s a better breakfast than we’re likely to have for a while,” she told him.
“If it’s not our last.”
Jenna sniffed. “I know these people, O’Deoradháin. They’re my friends.”
“They were once, aye. But friendship can be as hard to hold onto as a salmon in a stream.” He didn’t say more, but slid behind the table nearest the door. She noticed that O’Deoradháin sat with his back to the wall where he could see both the door and the rest of the room, and his hand stayed on the hilt of his dagger. She took a chair across from him.
They weren’t alone. There were two other tables occupied, one by Erin the Healer, who lived to the north of the village. He nodded to Jenna as if seeing her was no more unusual than seeing any of the rest of Ballintubber’s residents. At the other table were two men she didn’t recognize; travelers, evidently, since they had packs sitting next to their chairs. A head poked out from the kitchen: Tara’s son Eliath. He was a few inches taller than Jenna remembered, and a new, puckered scar meandered from his forehead to the base of his jaw. “Hey, Jenna! Mam said you were out here.”
“Eliath! It’s good to see you . . .”
He grinned and came over to the table. He glanced at O’Deoradháin, and the grin faded to a careful smile before he turned back to Jenna. “Good to see you, too. Everyone thought you and your mam were dead, when the Troubles started. Is your mam . . . ?”
“She’s fine. She’s in Lár Bhaile.”
The grin returned. “Lár Bhaile? That’s where Ellia went. She married Coelin Singer, did you know that?”
“I know,” Jenna said, forcing a smile. “I saw her, big with child.”
Tara had come up with a tray loaded with steaming mugs of tea and platters of food. She set them down on the table. “You saw my Ellia?” she asked. “Did she look well? Did she ask after us? We didn’t . . .” Tara blushed. “I’m afraid we didn’t part on the best of terms, and I haven’t heard from her since.”
“She looked lovely and wonderful and happy, and they’re living in a fine house in the town,” Jenna responded, giving them the lie she knew Tara wanted desperately to hear. “She’ll be a mam soon, probably already is by now, since I saw her last a few months ago. Coelin’s even sung for the Rí, and for the Tanaise Ríg when he visited there. She told me to give you her love when I came back to Ballintubber and to say that she missed you.”
“Truly?” Tara sighed. “I should go there,” she said. “The Mother-Creator knows there’s not much here. Not since the Troubles and all the death. I should go and see her and the babe. And your mam, too. Maybe this summer, once the spring rains have stopped.”
She wouldn’t go, Jenna knew. Like the rest of them, she would never leave Ballintubber. “I’m certain they’d love that. Both of them.”
Tara nodded. “You know, Jenna, I thought you were sweet on that Coelin yourself. The boy had half the young women of the village hanging on him, and my Ellia no different.”
“I didn’t have a chance with him,” Jenna answered. The smile was difficult to maintain. “Not with Ellia.”
Another sigh. T
hen Tara stirred. “But here I am prattling on about things and your food’s getting cold. Eat, and drink that tea before it turns to ice—it’s a cold day for the season, ’tis.” Despite the words, Tara seemed content to stay there, standing before the table. “Are you back home? Will you be building a new place on your mam’s land?” she asked, and her gaze drifted significantly to O’Deoradháin.
“No,” Jenna said. “This is Ennis O’Deoradháin, Tara—he’s a friend, a traveling companion. We’re going north—”
O’Deoradháin cleared his throat. When she glanced at him, he smiled, though his eyes glittered warningly. “—and east,” she finished. “Along the High Road up to Ballymote, then on to Glenkille and maybe even across the Finger to Céile Mhór.”
Tara’s eyebrows raised at the names. “So far? Child, I haven’t been farther than a stone’s throw from Ballintubber all my life, and you’re going all the way to Céile Mhór? It’s not safe traveling. Not any more. Not with the fighting and the lights in the sky, and the strange creatures that have been seen. Why, only the other night, Matron Kelly saw wolves with red eyes and as tall as horses on the hill near her house. A pair of them, howling and snarling and frightening her so that she was afraid to go out of her house for days. Killed four of her sheep—tore their throats out and picked them up in their mouths as if they weighed nothing at all. No, I wouldn’t be traveling. Not me.”
The two strangers had risen from their chairs. They passed by the table as they left without a word. Jenna saw O’Deoradháin’s gaze following them as they opened the door and went out.
“I see you still have people stopping at the inn,” Jenna said to Tara, nodding toward the door.
“Them? They’re the first in a week. Came up from the south, they say, from Ath Iseal. The High Road’s not as well traveled these days. And not much business of a night, either.” She shook her head, wiping her hands nervously on her apron. “Not since . . . well, you know. That was a bad time, when those Connachtans came raiding. Killed Aldwoman Pearce, and cut down Tom Mullins and all four of his sons not a dozen steps from here when they tried to help. And poor Eli; one of them opened up my boy’s face just because he didn’t move fast enough when they told him to curry their horses. It was awful. They burned half the houses, and some of the women they . . .” Her voice trailed off. Remembered horrors drained the color from her face.
“Aye. I understand,” Jenna told her.
“We thought you and your mam and that tiarna were all dead, too. We saw your house burning like the rest, and those that went to look said there was no one there alive, though there were dead Connachtans and your poor dog. We thought you’d been burned with the house.”
Jenna shook her head. She found she didn’t want to talk about it. The days when the Connachtans had swept through in pursuit of the mage-lights and Lámh Shábhála had damaged Ballintubber but not truly changed the place. Ballintubber remained sleepy and forgotten; if it was lucky, it might stay so. For the first time, Jenna saw just how much she’d been altered by the events of the last several months. She was no longer the person who had lived here. This was no longer “home.”
“We managed to sneak away, my mam and I and the tiarna,” she told Tara. “It didn’t seem safe to go back.”
“So you went to Lár Bhaile,” Tara finished for her. From the expression on her face, she seemed to find it alternately amusing and unbelievable that someone from Ballintubber would have made that choice. “And now you’re . . . traveling.” She said the word as if it were something mildly distasteful.
“And we’ll be needing horses,” O’Deoradháin broke in, leaning forward. “Would you have two good steeds in your stable, or can someone in the village sell us the mounts? We’ll pay in hard coin.”
Tara shrugged, but Eli spoke up. “We have one, sir—a roan mare that’s a good twelve hands high and strong,” he said. “And One Hand Bailey has another he’s been talking of selling, a big brown gelding, past its prime but still healthy. He was asking half a mórceint, and not getting it. He’d take less now, I’d wager.”
“He can have his half a mórceint,” O’Deoradháin told him. “And a mórceint to you and your mam for the roan and livery for the two. Here . . .” O’Deoradháin opened his purse and took out two of the coins, flipping them to Eli. “Go fetch the gelding and get them both ready for us, and you can have the other half mórceint yourself.” Eli grinned; Tara’s eyebrows went up again.
“Aye!” Eli almost shouted. “Give me a stripe; no, half a stripe,” he said, and he was gone, running. Tara, after a few more minutes of conversation, excused herself to go back into the kitchen. Erin the Healer left with another silent nod to Jenna. O’Deoradháin sipped his tea and leaned back in his chair. He whistled tunelessly.
“Horses?” Jenna asked.
“I didn’t like the way those two strangers stared at us, like they were memorizing our faces,” O’Deoradháin answered. “I didn’t like the fact that they came up the High Road from the south, either. If they’ve been traveling through Gabair, then who knows what they’ve heard and what they realize? I want to get as far away from here as fast as possible.”
“So you’re the little Rí here, eh?” She lowered her head in mocking subservience, then glared at him. “And I must follow your orders.”
“I would point out that you made the decision to come here. I’m just making the decision as to how to leave. That seems fair enough.” He gave her that strange, lopsided smile of his. “You know, I get the sense that you still don’t like or trust me much.”
“I don’t,” she told him. “Either one. I want to go to Inish Thuaidh; you do also. Our paths just happen to lie together at the moment.”
“And when they don’t?”
“When that happens, or if I decide I can’t trust you, then we part.”
O’Deoradháin nodded. He took a hunk of bread and gnawed it thoughtfully. “That seems fair enough, too,” he said.
33
A Battle of Stones
THEY were three days out of Ballintubber, and it still seemed strange to both of them that they’d encountered very few people. Though the land at the northern borders of Tuath Gabair was sparsely populated and they were traveling overland rather than on the road, the area seemed oddly empty. Fields that should have been plowed by now were fallow, with weeds and grass growing up among the straggling clumps of wheat and barley. The day before, they’d passed near one village, and though they heard the sounds of children playing and saw several women working the fields nearby, the only men they no ticed were the old. O’Deoradháin turned grim at the sight.
“They’ve been sweeping the land, then, and pressing men into service. The Rís are strengthening their armies,” he’d said, and Jenna hadn’t wanted to believe him.
Now the proof lay before her.
They were walking through a wooded valley between two tall ridge lines. The trees thinned, and they came out into an open field where the hills swept wide apart in great curving arms.
A mound of raw new earth cut across their path, and the banner of Tuath Gabair flapped on a pole planted in the dirt. Jenna glanced at O’Deoradháin; his face was grim, and he pulled on the reins of his horse to pass to the left of the mound.
He quickly brought his horse to a stop. “By the Mother,” he breathed. Jenna came up alongside him. “Gods,” she said. Her stomach jumped, and she tasted bile in her mouth.
They were on a slight rise. The full expanse of the field lay spread out before them: trampled, torn, and bloodied. Black flocks of carrion crows fought and scrabbled over the bodies of soldiers; feral dogs lifted their heads from gory feasts to glare suspiciously at them. Flies buzzed and whined through the air. The bodies, Jenna noted, all wore the blue and gold of Tuath Connachta. There were two more mounds on the field, and on each Gabair’s banner flew.
A few heads had been mounted on broken lances as a warning. O’Deoradháin rode his horse up to one of the trophies, the horse shying away from the
smell of rotting meat and the crow-emptied eye sockets, and a cloud of flies rising from the face as O’Deoradháin leaned over from his saddle to peer at it. The jaw hung upon, the head gaping in eternal amazement. “A boy,” he said. “No more than fifteen, I’ll wager, and a pressman in his Rí’s army. I’ll bet he told his mam he’d be back a hero.”
Jenna’s stomach turned again, and she leaned over, vomiting quickly. She hung onto the horse. The wind shifted slightly, and the smell came to them: rotting, ripe flesh. The sweet sickly smell of death.
“Victory,” O’Deoradháin said mockingly. “ ’Tis a wonderful sight, don’t you think?”
Jenna wiped her mouth and nudged her horse carefully forward. The horse nickered, its eyes wide and nervous. She looked down at a body to her right. The soldier sprawled awkwardly on his back, a broken sword still clutched in his hand. The rings of bronze and iron sewn on his boiled leather vest were ripped and broken over his abdomen, and a horrible wound had nearly split him in two. Scavengers had been at the body—the eyes and tongue were gone, his entrails pulled out and scattered, the flesh gnawed upon. White maggots crawled in and around his open mouth, in the sockets of his eyes. Jenna’s stomach lurched again, and she forced the gorge back down.
O’Deoradháin was riding slowly around the field, occasionally looking down at the earth. Jenna stayed where she was, not wanting to go out into the carnage. “What was left of the Connachtan force retreated west,” he said when he returned. “They weren’t pursued—from the looks of the mounds, the Gabairan troops lost a good many men also, and their commander decided to stay here and bury their dead. They moved off to the east, through that pass there.” He glanced down at the body of the soldier by Jenna. “The battle took place no more than two days ago, from the signs.” Jenna nodded; she was still staring at the body. “Jenna?”