by S L Farrell
Again, he threw up a shield; she broke it down as quickly. He tried to mask the flare of anger he felt, and that pleased her. Grudgingly, he answered. “Maeve’s well enough, and waiting in Falcarragh with my son.”
The mention of the child, her half brother, made her think of the baby in her own womb, the child she would never see. “Your bastard, you mean.”
“I love Maeve, Jenna, as I’ve told you before, and I treat her as well or better than any wife. I have acknowledged publicly that the child is mine; there’s no secret there. No matter what you want to believe, Jenna, I’m no monster. I never was your enemy. Never. You forced that upon yourself, like all the rest.”
“Aye, none of this could possibly be your fault,” Jenna taunted. “You’re so faultless and noble.”
“Your mam misses you,” Mac Ard said, ignoring the comment, “and she is afraid for you. I think she may even be afraid of you after what you did in Lár Bhaile. And she hates this war.”
“As do I.”
“Then end it, Jenna. Surrender yourself and Lámh Shábhála and we can negotiate a peace. You can’t win this, Jenna. Inish Thuaidh can’t stand alone against all the Tuatha.”
Jenna sent scorn hurtling through the mage-lights, not allowing him to see the doubts that his statement caused to stir within her. “Believe what you will. Tell Nevan that I remember his words at Lár Bhaile, how he said that everyone must know that the arm of Dun Laoghaire is long. Well, I know that now, but he will find that the arm of Inish Thuaidh may not reach as far, but it is stronger. Tell him that.” Lámh Shábhála was full. She closed her eyes, reveling in the sense of completeness and power that the lights gave her. She released the cloch.
Mac Ard and the rest of the clochs na thintrí vanished. The mage-lights began to dim in the sky.
The Rí MacBrádaigh died that night.
The Comhairle met briefly in the Banrion’s tent, deciding that the issue of a successor must wait, though they gave control of the Inish forces to Tiarna MacEagan. After a long conference, it was decided to strike Dun Kiil in three groups: the largest force taking the heights on which the keep sat, and two pincer arms coming in from the west and east along the lower valley where the main roads ran. The west and east attacks would occur simultaneously, hopefully diverting the attention of the Rí Ard’s forces and drawing them down toward the harbor so that the assault on the keep would have the advantage of surprise. They already knew that the Rí Ard, the Tanaise Ríg, and most of the Tuathian Mages were in the keep, and it was there that the battle would be won or lost. There were secret passages into the keep that the Riocha had used for centuries to flee or enter in secret: the Banrion sent Tiarna O Beolláin of Baile Nua along with several squads of soldiers along those hidden paths with the task of opening the gates and doors of the keep from the inside as the main force approached.
As for the cloudmages, two would go with each of the initial waves both to protect them and so that they ap peared to be legitimate attacks: Mundy and another Brá thair were assigned to the eastern forces and Máister Cléurach and the new cloudmage with the west. MacEagan, Aithne, and Jenna would remain with the main force.
The encampment woke before the dawn and began to move, assembling in the narrow valley, then moving up toward the low pass to the south. Their faces grim and set, they left behind the tents of the camp followers and their families as well as those too seriously wounded to walk. Many of those who went with the army were limping or still bearing blood-stained bandages from the battle a few days before, Jenna no less than any of them. She walked with the cloudmages in the midst of the column: Banrion Aithne, MacEagan, Galen, Máister Cléurach, Mundy, and two other Bráthairs of the Order, one of them new to his Cloch Mór.
Jenna felt as if she were walking into the face of her own doom.
Not long after noon, they were within a few miles of the city. There, the forces divided, and the main group waited for a few candle stripes to allow the others to begin the encirclement. Finally, with the sun already lowering in the west, they rose and started to climb up the long slope to the plateau where Dún Kiil Keep stood brooding and weeping over its town.
Jenna plodded along with the others. There was very little talk, all of them lost in their own reveries, their own hopes and fears, wondering perhaps if they would still be alive after this day.
Jenna felt only a dull fatalism. The miles she’d trudged that day had been exhausting on their own, a challenge for the slowly healing cuts and scrapes of her body, for muscles torn and taken to their limits only a few days before. She shivered under her thick woolen clóca, and her right arm was a block of flesh-colored ice against her side.
If Jenna herself was quiet, the voices inside Lámh Sháb hála were not.
“. . . this is too soon. The last time nearly killed you . . .”
“. . . you’ll be with us, one of the ghosts within Lámh Shábhála, yammering at the next Holder . . .”
“Be still!” The voice was a near-roar in the mental din: Riata’s voice. “Leave her alone if you have nothing to say that will help her.”
“Riata!” Jenna thought to him, closing her mind’s ears to the rest of them. “I’m so scared.”
“Those who are the bravest are those who know what they face and still go to meet it,” Riata answered.
“I’m not brave,” Jenna answered. “I just want this to be done and over, even though . . .” She couldn’t say the words. But Riata knew or guessed her thoughts.
“If you want to live, then you must use what you’ve learned. Go deeper into the stone, Jenna. Remember where you went at Bethiochnead. Find that place again.”
“I don’t know if I can. I only glimpsed it once, in pain and desperation. Riata, I don’t care if I live. Not anymore. It doesn’t matter.”
“Find it!” Riata insisted, then his voice was gone again, drowned in the babble of the other Holders. Jenna forced them away from her, shoving them back down into the recesses of Lámh Shábhála.
“Are you all right?” She heard MacEagan’s voice only faintly. Opening her eyes, Jenna realized that her hands were clasped over her ears as if the voices of the Holders had been physical and real. She lowered them, shivering as the cold reality of the mountains returned to her.
“I’m fine,” she told him. Alby was standing just behind the tiarna, his soft hands around the hilt of a sword. “Is it time?”
“Nearly.” MacEagan’s gaze moved off to the ridge beyond which the Keep stood. “No matter how this ends, it will be remembered. The bards will be singing of it for the rest of time.”
“I hope you have the chance to hear that song.”
He didn’t notice the stress on the “you.” “So do I,” MacEagan answered. “Win or lose, I’ve sent too many people to their graves today.” He smiled wanly at her. “Of course, if we lose, I won’t have to worry about the guilt, will I now? And if we win, why, I can console myself with the necessity of it all. I wonder if every leader feels that way.”
“I doubt most of them think of it at all,” Jenna answered.
He chuckled quietly; at the same time, the bass growl of thunder rolled loud from the south and west of them. A thunderhead appeared there, dark against the bright sky. “Máister Cléurach and Stormbringer,” he said. “It’s begun.” Already the soldiers were rushing all around them, and the banner of Inish Thuaidh waved at the head of the column. They began to move quickly, a bright swarm over the rocks and mosses of the hills.
Jenna heard the faint clamor of battle as they crested the rise. The tri-towered ramparts of the keep were black outlines drawn on the sky, the town unseen past the cliffs of the Croc a Scroilm, but the wind off the bay sent to them the ringing of iron and bronze and the cries of the combat. Jenna opened Lámh Shábhála as they reached the summit: aye, the Clochs Mór were awake now and fighting. So far at least, MacEagan’s tactics had been successful—the clochs were all intent on the two arms already attacking the town, perhaps waiting for Lámh Shábhála t
o appear in one place or the other. There were Clochs Mór awake in the keep and not yet engaged—Mac Ard’s among them—but she could feel their attention focused outward.
That could not last long, she knew. She wondered how close they would get before someone on the walls looked behind and saw them.
It wasn’t long. There was no outcry that Jenna heard, but she felt the shift in attention within Mac Ard. “Now!” she cried aloud to MacEagan and Aithne. “They know we’re here.”
Gouts of too-red fire spat from the window of the north ernmost tower, rushing toward the front ranks of the troops. Jenna stretched Lámh Shábhála’s fingers toward them, touching each with the cloch’s power: they exploded in brilliant flame a hundred yards short of the target. A cheer went up from the Inishlanders and they began to run toward the keep. Jenna heard the first ululations of the caointeoireacht na cogadh, shrieking from their throats as they charged toward the castle . . .
. . . she ran with them, half blind with the overlay of the cloch-vision. The rush carried her along, and she glimpsed MacEagan and Aithne near her. The air was loud with the keening and the rattling of mail and the thudding of feet on the earth . . .
. . . even as the last glare of the fireballs faded, Jenna ripped at the tower with the cloch as if tearing the stones apart with her own hand—great blocks tumbled away from the window where Mac Ard had been. He was a raging, throbbing scarlet in the cloch-vision, like a volcano spewing lava. Jenna could feel the heat of him, and she countered with the cold of the void, wrapping him in blue-white ice, placing more and more of it around him as he melted away each layer desperately. The glow was beginning to dim as he poured more energy from his Cloch Mór to keep her away, and for a moment, she dared to believe that she could end it here . . .
. . . they were close to the keep now, and arrows filled the air in a deadly rain. She saw the man beside her suddenly drop, a feathered shaft sprouting from his neck as blood spurted, but then he was gone under the rush. The main gates to the keep loomed ahead, but they were still shut . . .
. . . something snarled, and a whip of arcing yellow slapped down across her shoulders. Jenna whirled and saw a dragon’s face, jaws open with needled teeth as it clamped down on her shoulder and coiled the rest of its body around her. Jenna howled, the teeth digging deep into her, the writhing scales flaying the skin from her body everywhere it touched. “MacEagan!” Jenna shouted, but even as she called, she realized that both MacEagan and Aithne were each struggling with a rival Cloch Mór and couldn’t come to her aid. Mac Ard was nearly free of his confinement. Jenna imagined herself growing larger, her skin hard as stone, and energy flowed from Lámh Shábhála into her. The yellow coils of the dragon’s body snapped and broke, and she followed fading energy back to its source—a young man, his face pale and frightened as he realized who he faced—but she saw him only for an instant as Lámh Sháb hála tore at his Cloch Mor, draining it. She thought she could hear the young man whimper, and Jenna wondered if she had killed him . . .
. . . The charge faltered with the sight of the closed gates, the front ranks spreading out along the walls as the arrows continued to arc down on them. “The doors were supposed to be opened!” someone shouted. “We can’t go forward . . .”
. . . furious now, Jenna swept the cloch-vision about, searching for Mac Ard, but she was given no chance to find him. The mage-demon landed just outside the keep, towering above the onrushing Inishlanders, and it roared as it plunged into their ranks, tearing and ripping with its clawed hands and feet. She saw it storm forward and pick up a man bodily, legs and arms flailing, and rip the body apart as if it were a rag doll, blood and entrails splattering as it tossed the broken corpse aside. The war-keening faltered; the advance slowed like a tide striking a rising seabed. The beast laughed, its wings spreading and blotting out the setting sun, and it bent to its terrible task once more. Jenna shouted and unleashed Lámh Shábhála again, reaching out with arms of energy to pluck the thing up and smash it down on the ground again before it could react to the attack. She sent thunderbolts raining down on it, striking it again and again and yet again. The creature bellowed as she tore at it, and she heard the mirroring cries from its Holder within the keep. In the cloch-vision, a coiling line of gold led from the mage-creature back to the Cloch Mór which spawned it, and Jenna sent of blade of energy down on it, severing the link. The mage-demon howled once more and vanished, and Jenna would have finished it then . . .
. . . the arrows no longer fell, but something else did: several hands of round balls arced over the walls, rolling into the midst of the Inishlanders. Where they fell, great cries of anguish went up. One fell near Jenna and she saw that it was not a stone but a severed head, the eyes still wide open, long black hair matted with mud and caked blood. She recognized the gory features even through the distortion of the death rictus: it was Tiarna Ó Beolláin, and she knew then that those who had been sent to open the keep from the inside had failed. The last glow of sunlight was fading; darkness was falling, and when she looked up at the walls of the keep, she saw the first stars glitter in the dome of the sky . . .
. . . light blazed all around her, suddenly. A half-dozen flares of power, multihued and dangerous, Mac Ard among them. Jenna reflexively threw up shields as they attacked as one, and she was suddenly contending with attacks from all sides, the snarl and blinding light of mage-energy pound ing at her. Mac Ard sent his fire; she caught it with Lámh Shábhála and threw the flame toward the great glowing wolf that was leaping toward her. Spears of golden sunlight cascaded from the shield, but she couldn’t respond fast enough to the others. A stream of rich azure slithered through, burning her while a funnel of utter black whirled above, its mouth twisting ravenously. She could feel the power of Lámh Shábhála being leached away by the tornado . . .
. . . the war-keening had died. Around her, the soldiers milled, confused and stymied. Rams were brought forward to break down the gates, but archers on the walls cut down half the men wielding them. The gates shuddered with the impact but held. MacEagan’s lava-creature—bright in the growing darkness—came lumbering forward to smash open the iron-barred wood, but the mage-demon, returning to the battelfield, met him, the two struggling before the gates so that none could get past. The moving shadows of their contest played over the faces of the soldiers, and Jenna could see the despair and resignation there. Jenna knew that the gates must go down now or they must retreat. To stay would mean being decimated by the archers on the walls and the Clochs Mór . . .
. . . This was the end, Jenna realized, even as she fought the Clochs Mór arrayed against her, even as she tossed wild power around her and threw them all momentarily back. She was stronger, aye, but they would bear her down under sheer numbers. The Inish hope had been that the army could gain the keep, that sword and spear would cut down a few of the Mages or cause them to look elsewhere. Mac Ard’s cloch attacked her again, and this time she could not push it aside. The force struck her, enveloping her in fire, and she screamed as the blow sent her reeling backward and her freshly healed wounds ripped open again. Unseen hands caught her and held her upright, but they, too, shouted in pain as they touched Mac Ard’s blaze. Jenna held Lámh Shábhála aloft in futile defiance, gathering power in the fist of her mind and sending it smashing down to where she sensed Mac Ard standing—but the other clochs interposed themselves, shunting the energy aside or absorbing it themselves. She could feel their realization that victory was to be theirs, that they were enough to over whelm Lámh Shábhála. Their colors circled her, like hungry wolves harrying an injured but still dangerous storm deer stag. They would come in for the final kill now, and Jenna found that the anger inside her, even toward Mac Ard, had dissolved into resignation. She hadn’t wanted this fight in the first place, and people all around her were dying, all because of the cloch she held . . .
. . . the men around the mage-demon hacked at it, but it kicked them aside as if they were bothersome flies. It leaped upon the lava-creature, an
d Jenna saw its clawed hands grasp the glowing head and twist it. A sound came like stones splitting, and MacEagan’s cloch-created creature was gone. She saw MacEagan, several yards away, collapse as Alby wailed, dropped his sword, and sank down alongside him, cradling the unconscious tiarna in his lap. The mage-demon began rampaging through the Inishlanders closest to the gate, and Jenna saw men starting to retreat in panic into the gathering night, pushing back against the ranks behind them . . .
. . . her cloch-vision was filled with the lights of the Tuathian Holders. She gathered a shield around her; they broke it down. Lámh Shábhála was weakening now; she was using its stores quickly. She could prepare a final stroke, perhaps aiming it at Mac Ard, or she could simply allow it to happen—quickly and hopefully without too much pain. The mage-demon had fastened its eyes on her, and was plowing through the soldiers between it and her . . .
. . . now. It’s better that we die now, she told herself and her unborn child. If we die, this ends. The Tuathians will have what they want, and Inish Thuaidh will have to retreat and then negotiate for peace, but the battle will end. In the final tally, we will have saved hundreds of lives. Won’t that be better . . . ?
. . . but there was something else in Lámh Shábhála’s vision now, moving swiftly toward them from the tumbled rocks at the feet of the mountain close to the keep, and there was the sound of rocks clashing together in furious handclaps, a storm of sound, and mingled with it a musical warbling that Jenna remembered well. She blinked, won deringly. The Créneach . . . !
In their valley near Thall Coill, she had never seen them move this quickly. They were surprisingly graceful despite their size and appearance, their craggy bodies sliding among the amazed Inishlanders. The mage-demon howled, fluttered its leathery wings and flung itself at them; one of the Créneach slapped at it with a bouldered hand and the mage-demon shattered like glass. Several more of them went to the gates of the keep. The archers sent a hail of arrows down at them, but the shafts clattered and broke on their smooth, dark skin. The Créneach placed their hands on the great doors and their fingers seemed to sink into the wood as if the oak were no more substantial than newly-churned butter: they ripped the gates open, splinters and shards of reinforcing metal flying, the portcullis torn out and flung aside as if it were made of sticks. The Inish troops cheered; they began to surge forward again. A ferocious battle was quickly underway at the ruins of the gate as the defending soldiers within came forward to meet the Inishlanders.