Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

“You underestimate Keira,” Seancoim answered quietly. “You always did. She’s been away from me and doing the work of the Protector for over two hands of years now. I see you still don’t trust Toryn and keep him close so you can correct his mistakes.”

  Toryn visibly flushed at that, and the bow came up once more. Seancoim lifted his staff even as Jenna started to open Lámh Shábhála. “Do you really want to match our skills, Toryn?” Seancoim asked. “It would be a shame. Lomán’s getting too old to begin with a new pledge-child.”

  Toryn glared; Lomán spat on the ground. “Put your bow away, boy,” Lomán said. “Don’t let him goad you into foolishness. It’s not Crow-Eye you have to worry about; it’s the Holder. Slow magic can’t stand against Lámh Shábhála, even when it’s wielded by a girl-child.”

  “I’m not a child,” Jenna snapped back angrily.

  Lomán didn’t answer directly, but his eyes showed his contempt. “You misunderstand if you think I’m being anything but kind to you, Holder. I’d love nothing better than to see you fail here—with none of your own people around you. It’s been a thousand years and more since a Bunús Muintir held Lámh Shábhála. I wonder . . . what would a Bunús Holder be able to accomplish? Perhaps the Daoine could be made to regret what your ancestors did to us, eh?”

  “What would happen to Lámh Shábhála after I’m gone isn’t my concern,” Jenna answered. “If I fail, I fail.”

  “Then you have a death wish.”

  “I’m not afraid of death,” Jenna answered. “I’ve seen too much of it.”

  Lomán’s eyes narrowed at that. “Maybe not such a child, now . . .” he muttered. “But you’ve chosen a poor adviser if you’re listening to Seancoim.” His gaze went back to Seancoim. “You think she can survive Scrúdú, Crow-Eye? You can look at this stripling and believe that?”

  “Riata believes it,” Seancoim answered.

  Lomán made a sound like a kettle too long on the fire. “Riata’s long dead.”

  “His body, aye, but his spirit is still restless and he has spoken to Jenna. He seems . . . impressed by her.”

  Lomán snorted again. “The Daoine are a weak race. They conquered us only because they were so many and we were so few. They conquered us because their swords were iron and ours were bronze. But even with steel and numbers, they still wouldn’t have won had our clochs na thintrí not been decades asleep when they came.” One shoulder rose and fell. “We would have pushed the Daoine back to Céile Mhór and beyond if the clochs had been awake. But go ahead, Crow-Eye. Let her try. I think Toryn would be a good Holder, afterward.”

  The youth grinned at that, cocking his head appraisingly toward Jenna. “It’s about time that Lámh Shábhála came home to Thall Coill,” he said. His voice was thick and low, blurred with the Bunús Muintir accent, a voice of confidence and certainty. “I’ll be happy to escort the two of you to Bethiochnead, and afterward . . .” He grinned again, showing his teeth. “Lámh Shábhála will come back to us, and perhaps we can obtain a few of the Cloch Mór, then who knows? It may be that the Bunús Muintir will emerge from our forests and hills and take back what was once ours, an age ago.” Dreams flashed in his eyes, widening his smile.

  “Come with me, Holder,” he said. “Let me show you Thall Coill.”

  It was Toryn who led Jenna and Seancoim through the trackless forest, Lomán refusing to accompany them. “I’ve no interest in watching your Daoine die,” he told Seancoim. “That’s your task, since you brought her here. And I’m too old to want Lámh Shábhála.”

  The forest . . .

  A spine-backed form slunk away through the snarl of seedlings to their right. A patch of moonlight struck blue highlights from a whorled shell taller than Jenna, glimpsed in a meadow bordering the shoulder of a black stream. The smell of sulfur and rotting meat wafted from a fissure bound in vines. Air colder than winter or the heights of the mountains spread from a pond whose glowing water was the color of buttermilk fresh from a churn. Calls and hoots and shrill cries erupted from the darkness around them.

  And the tree-song . . . Jenna heard the call of the ancient oaks, the green life in the most ancient and lost hollows of Thall Coill, a compelling whisper that rustled the leaves above them, that caused the oaks to bend down with many limbed branches, that hushed the call of the mage-lights nearly invisible under the canopy of the forest. Thall Coill had a stronger, more insistent voice than Doire Coill, a call that echoed down in the very fibers of Jenna’s being. The voice of the forest awoke primitive echoes, as if pulling at impossibly ancient ties between the trees and her most distant ancestors. More than once, Jenna found herself straying from the path, wandering away as Seancoim and Toryn continued on. The first time it happened, Seancoim called to her, breaking the spell, and Toryn laughed. “She’s weak,” he told Seancoim. “The Old Ones would snare her, and we’d find her bones years later, sitting against their trunks.”

  Jenna flushed, embarrassed that she could succumb to the trees’ singing, but she noticed as Toryn turned away that there were tufts of moss in his ears, and that Toryn pushed them in deeper as he strode away.

  You’re not the only one . . . Seancoim nodded to her, with a quick smile; he had noticed as well. “Everything beautiful is also dangerous,” he said to her before turning to stump along after Toryn.

  As Jenna followed along behind them, she tried to see the forest with Seancoim’s eyes. It was beautiful in its way, she had to admit. The oaks, their massive trunks wound with vines of mistletoe, with girths so wide that two people could not have encircled them with their hands, were survivors from when Thall Coill, Doire Coill, and the few other old growth forests had dominated all of Talamh An Ghlas, penetrating far into Céile Mhór and even to the great conti nent of Thall Mór-roinn. The Daoine were still in their homelands then; the Bunús Muintir were nothing but a series of family-based clans scratching out a subsistence existence under the trees, their culture just starting to coalesce.

  Walking here, Jenna felt as the first peoples must have felt: insignificant and small in the midst of this ancient life. The forest was a single creature, a vast and intricate organism in whose bowels she walked, and within its body was mystery, danger, and, aye, great beauty. If the forest desired, it could crush her with its sheer weight. It tolerated her because she was too small to do it any real harm.

  She understood for the first time why the Bunús Muintir could worship a goddess whose earthly form was an oak tree.

  They walked for hours, Toryn (deliberately, Jenna was certain) keeping a quick pace that made it difficult for Seancoim to stay with him. Jenna remained at Seancoim’s side; Toryn would at times be so far ahead of them that he was barely visible in the moonlight filtering down through the trees. Each time, Seancoim sent Dúnmharú angrily flying to the young man, screeching at him from a nearby branch until he stopped to wait, hands on hips, while they caught up with him again. And each time, as they approached, he would start off once more without a word.

  Jenna had decided she despised the man by the time false dawn tinted the horizon with rose and ocher.

  The call of the Old Ones had faded; Jenna could hear the rhythmic pulse of the sea crashing against rock. The land was rising steeply under them, the trees thinning quickly until they gave way entirely to a grassy swath. Here, the bones of the land showed through the dirt: furrowed lines of bare gray limestone, the cracks sprouting a few weeds clinging to the thin film of earth at the bottom. At the top of the rise, the land simply stopped at a sheer cliff while—nearly a hundred feet below—waves gnawed at the feet of the island. The wind blew in steadily, cold and misty. And there . . . where in her dream of Peria and Tadhg had been only the sense of a presence that would not allow itself to be seen . . .

  It might have been a huge cat or, perhaps, a dragon. The statue stood a few strides from the cliff edge, gazing out to sea as if it were protecting the forest or the island from unseen invaders. The statue was carved of jet-black stone, glassy and volcanic in appearance an
d unlike any rock Jenna had seen in the area. The head was perched thirty feet above them on a massive four-legged body, sitting down on its haunches with its tail wrapping around its left side and curling away to end abruptly at the cliff edge. Along the sloping back, there were two ridges where wings might once have been, though there was no evidence of them having tumbled to the ground around them. The monument’s features were blurred by the weight of centuries, polished by wind and sand, eroded by rain until all that remained was the obscured outline of what the creature had once been.

  “Bethiochnead,” Seancoim said as Jenna gazed up at the creature. “It was here when we Bunús Muintir came. No one knows who erected this or exactly what it is.”

  “The Greatness Herself put Bethiochnead here for the Bunús Muintir to find,” Toryn said from the side of the statue. “It still holds Her power.”

  Seancoim shrugged. “That’s what some believe, aye,” he told Jenna. He glanced at Toryn. “But not all. There may have been other races here before the Bunús and Daoine, and they may have made this. Some think it was the Créneach who sculpted it, that this is a representation of one of their gods. Others think it may be a Créneach, solidified by some magic, or else a mythical creature snared by a spell, or . . .” He stopped, tapping his staff on the rocks as if testing their stability. “Its origin doesn’t matter. It only matters that it’s here. This is the center. This is where the mage-lights are strongest.”

  “What do I do?” Jenna asked. She clutched her right arm to herself. It felt colder and more lifeless than ever, though there was no pain. She could only move the fingers with great effort. The scars on her flesh were pure white, as if etched with new snow.

  “You rest,” Seancoim told her. “And sleep if you can. When you’re ready, I’ll tell you all I know.”

  53

  Bethiochnead

  SHE hadn’t thought she could sleep, but she did. In her dream, she was with Ennis in Ballintubber, entering Tara’s Tavern. Coelin was there inside, and Ellia with several small children around her, all of whom looked like miniature Coelins. Everyone was singing and dancing, and Ennis and Jenna joined in with them. In the midst of the dancing, without warning, the door opened with a sudden crash like thunder. A form stood there in darkness, cloaked in black with its face hidden and sending a surge of unreasoning fear through Jenna. She grabbed Ennis by the hand and they ran—that agonizing, skin-crawling slow run of dreams where the legs refuse to cooperate no matter how hard you try. Somehow, she and Ennis retreated into the fireplace and through another door at the back of the chimney, which led them outside again. It was raining, and Kesh was barking and running circles around her. Mac Ard was shouting something from inside the cottage (for when Jenna looked about, they were back at the old house), only when she glanced up it was her father Niall whose face she saw at the window. Her mam was outside with Jenna, and Jenna felt a stab of jealousy because Ennis was so close to Maeve, his arm around her waist . . .

  Jenna woke up, feeling a sense of incredible loss sitting heavy on her chest as the remnants of the dream faded quickly in the light of reality.

  It was late afternoon, and the clouds had cleared. The statue cast a long shadow that reached the cliff edge and disappeared. She seemed to be alone, though Seancoim’s pack was next to hers. She sat up, the blanket around her shoulders, and saw Dúnmharú come flapping out of the woods. The crow circled the statue once but didn’t land on it, coming instead to rest on a nearby boulder. The bird cocked its head at her; a moment later, she saw Seancoim and Toryn walking up the slope from under the emerald cave of the oaks. She stood, shivering a bit despite the warm sun, as they approached. Toryn was staring at her; she ignored him. Seancoim handed her an apple. “Here, you should eat something. Did you sleep?”

  Jenna took a bite of the apple, letting its tart sweetness awaken her, and shrugged. “A bit.” She glanced at the statue. “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “That depends on you. You’re still resolved to try? You realize that only a few times has anyone gone through the Scrúdú and survived?”

  “And none of those were Daoine,” Toryn added. When she glanced at him, he smiled.

  “I don’t care about me,” she told them. “If I die, I can be with Ennis. If I don’t, then maybe his death will mean . . . will . . .” She stopped. The heaviness returned to her chest, not allowing the words out. Seancoim nodded as Dúnmharú hopped up into the air and, with a flap of black wings, landed on the old man’s shoulder.

  “All right,” he said. He came over to her and hugged her. She let herself fall into his herb-scented embrace, her arms going around him. “You can do this,” he whispered to her. “You can.”

  He released her, his blind gaze looking past her out to the sea. “Stand in front of Bethiochnead, Jenna,” he said. “Take Lámh Shábhála in your hand, and open the cloch. That’s all you need to do. The rest . . .” He patted her cheek, smiling gap-toothed at her. “You’ll have to tell us, afterward.”

  He walked with Jenna around to the front of the statue. She could hear the waves roaring against the rocks; she could feel the wind tousling her hair and the sun warming her face; she could smell the salt breeze mixed with mint and loam. The colors of the landscape seemed impossibly saturated, the green of the grass like glowing emerald, the limestone ribs of the land speckled with white and red and soft pink. She wondered if she would ever see them again. She wondered how much it would hurt.

  Her hand closed around Lámh Shábhála. She willed the cloch na thintrí to open, and felt the power go surging forth.

  She was still standing near the cliffside, but the land now ended several feet farther out. And the statue . . .

  It was no longer ruined and half missing. The legs and chest rippled with carved tendons; the feet were cat-clawed, seeming to tear into the rock on which the creature sat. The body was scaled, feathered, and brightly painted: the red of new-shed blood and the blue of a child’s eyes, the simmering yellow of the yolk of a hen’s egg. The expanse of wings spread majestically from its back, ribbed and fingered like some gigantic bat’s, with black, leathery skin pouched like sails between the ribs. The tail was complete, with a barbed, bulging tip at its end.

  The head had a long muzzle, the mouth partially open to reveal twin rows of daggered white teeth. The ears were like a cat’s also, though between them were scales like staggered rows of painted shields; its eyebrows were two fans of spines, meeting above the muzzle and running back over the middle of the skull. The eyes were frighteningly human; the large, expressive eyes of a child, and as Jenna gazed at the statue, the eyes blinked and opened. Though the mouth didn’t move, a low, stentorian voice purred.

  “So. Another one comes after all these years.”

  Jenna could feel the power flooding from the statue; above, the mage-lights curled, visible even in the bright sunlight. The trees of the forest beyond writhed and swayed as if they, too, were alive and capable of pulling roots from ground and capering about. “Who are you?” Jenna asked. Her voice sounded thin and weak in this charged atmosphere.

  The eyes blinked once more. A shimmering change rippled through the body from spiny crest to curled-claw feet and when it passed, the thing was no longer painted stone but living flesh. It stretched like a cat waking from a nap, the wings snapping and sending a rush of wind past Jenna. “I am An Phionós,” it said. “I am the First, and you are now in my world.”

  Its voice was Ennis’.

  “Stop that!” Jenna shouted at the creature, and it reared its great head, the mouth curling in a near-laugh, the eyes flashing.

  “Ah, my dear Jenna. Do you think you’re so strong that you can command my obedience?” it asked with seeming mirth, still with Ennis’ inflection and tone. Then the mocking amusement left, along with the memory of Ennis’ voice. An Phionlós hissed, steam venting from its nostrils. Mage lights flickered around it in a bright storm. “Are you stronger than me, Jenna? Do you remember Peria’s fate? Do you remember how she sc
reamed as I crushed the life from her? I give you this boon: release Lámh Shábhála now, before it’s too late.”

  Jenna’s fisted hand trembled around the cloch. She could feel An Phionós bending its will to her, insinuating itself into her muscles and prying at her fingers, loosening them. Yet with the intrusion she also caught a glimmer of the entity’s mind, and she realized that, despite its fury and insolence, An Phionós didn’t actively seek her death. It had no choice as to how it must act. “Why do you do this?” she asked, gasping as she fought to keep hold of the cloch.

  An Phionós laughed, a bitter and wild sound. “One should never offend a god,” it answered. “Their revenge is swift and eternal, and that’s why I sit here forever waiting. You, at least, have a choice—let go of the cloch and live, Jenna, or continue to hold it and die.”

  “And if I hold it and don’t die?”

  “That won’t happen. But if you do . . . there are depths within Lámh Shábhála that you have only glimpsed, and the shaping of this entire age could be yours.” Again the laugh. “I hope you don’t think that’s a gift. It would be the greatest burden of all.” An Phionós bent down close to her. The scent of rotting meat drifted from its mouth. “Re lease the cloch, Jenna. I have nothing for you but pain.” An Phionós’ hold on her hand vanished; it sat back on its haunches again. “Make your choice now.”

  Jenna glanced wildly about her and An Phionlós snorted. “Your friend can’t help you. Look . . .” The air shimmered, and for a moment Jenna caught a glimpse of Seancoim, his mouth open in a shout, trying to push forward toward her as the mage-lights threw him back. Then he was gone again. “He doesn’t see what you see. He sees only your struggle, not me.” An Phionós’ front paws kneaded the earth, tearing at the limestone. His voice was Ennis’ again, and now Ennis’ eyes gazed down at her from An Phionós’ face, a single tear rising and sliding down a scaled cheek to splash on the rocks. “I don’t want you to die, my love. Don’t do this.”