But Greum wasn’t here, and this was not his anamacha, and blood was about to be spilled, and her children might be truly lost as a result. “Come to me …” she said aloud, and a storm erupted in her head and in Magh da Chèo. The other voices went wailing away as if driven by a wind.
Voada could see the anger around her in the real world as well: blood-colored flashes across her vision.
The living world slowed, as if those in it moved through air thick as honey, as Voada’s hands wove a net in the air, as she chanted the words that the Moonshadow fed her, as she gathered up the energy, her head throbbing as she tried to contain it all.
Voada could see what the Moonshadow wanted to do, but it was more difficult and more painful than any spell she’d cast before. This required precision and using the anamacha’s power slowly rather than releasing it all at once. It burned her to hold it all. Voada’s hands almost ceased to move, and the power she was holding threatened to spill out without any control at all; she knew if that happened, no one around her would survive. Lightning crackled and snapped, and the wind howled. The Moonshadow’s voice was the thunder.
Voada was the Moonshadow. The ancient draoi’s presence filled her, crowding out everything else, and she knew that Greum had been right: it would be easy to become overcome by this personality, to lose her own sense of self and go tumbling away into that storm to be lost forever. But she thought of Orla and Hakan’s faces and forced herself to remain where she was. The Moonshadow’s hands moved in a pattern Voada had never seen before, and she copied it. The dead draoi chanted words, and Voada opened her mouth to echo them.
Voada obeyed, gathering the power in her hands. The new web that she’d fashioned in the world of the anamacha allowed her to hold the power of the spell, to control the amount of energy she permitted to flow from her. Scatter them, the Moonshadow had said.
“Anail!” she shouted, pointing at the combatants frozen before her, and it was as if she’d released a howling hurricane gale into the room, but one she could direct, which touched nothing but what she wished it to touch. She sent Maol sprawling, the sword falling from his hand, and did the same to the àrd and his sons. Wielding the powerful storm wind, she sent them stumbling and falling as they tried to rise, pushing the four of them until they tumbled through the door, as she walked calmly outside after them. In the muddy yard, she separated them, sending the àrd and his sons toward the pigs’ pen and Maol to the stone wall of the nearest field. The power was still trembling and roiling inside her, demanding release. She sent the remainder of the energy the Moonshadow had given her into the sky, where it blew apart the rain clouds, allowing the sun to break through. Magaidh and the rest of the household had followed them outside, and the field workers stopped their labor once more, gaping at the sight of a warrior and the àrd’s family rolling in the mud like mad creatures, pursued by a draoi.
“Fools!” Voada shouted at Maol Iosa and Àrd Mac Tsagairt, who were groggily trying to stand. She could still feel the Moonshadow’s presence within her, and the dark world of the anamacha was doubled in her vision. Her shout was the Moonshadow’s as well as her own: a god’s bellow that boomed and roared and echoed, a din so loud that the pigs bleated and squealed and the sheep in the meadow reared and fled. Voada heard horses neighing in alarm from the stable alongside the house. The children clapped hands to their ears. “Idiots! No wonder the Mundoa could push the clans back into their hideaways in the mountains! We fight amongst ourselves more than we fight them. You’re all mad, stupid, and stubborn! Go ahead and brawl if you want, but you’re only hurting the Cateni!”
Then the Moonshadow left her, and Voada was only in her own world again, feeling empty, feeling as if she’d lost part of herself. She was nearly drained; she had to force herself to remain standing. But the anger helped. Voada turned and stalked back into the house, knowing that she had to sit down or she would fall.
She managed to make it back to her chair before her legs gave way. She closed her eyes, trying to slow her shaking breath and pounding heart, all her limbs still trembling. She concentrated on simply breathing. It was enough.
“You are the true ceanndraoi,” she heard Magaidh say somewhere close to her. “I heard the Moonshadow. I felt the power you held.”
Her eyelids felt as if they were made of lead, but Voada managed to open them. Magaidh was standing on the other side of the table. Her eyes were wide and troubled. “I’m not …” Voada began to say, but the doorway darkened, and they both turned their heads to see the àrd and Maol entering. Their clothes were torn and soiled, and they were scratched and bruised and bleeding.
It was the àrd who spoke first, his head bowed toward Voada. “I’m sorry I doubted you, Draoi Voada,” he said, the simple words a growling whisper. “Perhaps there is a way Clan Mac Tsagairt can help you.”
“You’ve convinced Comhnall to come with you, to help raise the other clans?” Magaidh asked.
“Yes. Ceannàrd Iosa has promised him that he will be First Àrd under him, and in turn your husband will bring as many warriors as he can muster,” Voada answered. She’d left Maol and Àrd Mac Tsagairt still talking around the table with several flagons of ale consumed between them. She’d gone into the kitchen to find Magaidh there with only a kitchen hearth and a few candles providing light, as if she’d been waiting for her. The rest of the household was in their beds.
“You can see my anamacha, can’t you?” Voada asked Magaidh.
The woman nodded in reply.
“There have been draoi in your family?”
Another nod. Voada saw Magaidh’s gaze flick over to the ghostly presence near her. “A few. My seanmhair was … That’s the reason that Comhnall pursued me after his first wife died. An àrd whose wife was draoi—he thought that would give him prestige.” She ducked her head, blond hair falling past her shoulders. “But no anamacha ever came to me, so I couldn’t go to Onglse and learn the craft.”
“Mine didn’t come to me,” Voada told her, “until I was much older than you. Do you see taibhse, too?”
This time Magaidh shook her head. “Our menach, down in the village, can see the ghosts of the dead, but I can’t. Is that why I’ve no anamacha?”
“No,” Voada told her. “Not all draoi are menach, nor all menach draoi. Greum Red-Hand can’t see the taibhse either. Ceannàrd Iosa can’t see my anamacha, but I think he can see the taibhse. Perhaps he could have been a menach if he hadn’t become a warrior.” Voada watched the flickering of the blue flames above the peat for a moment. “Greum Red-Hand told me when he was teaching me that there are only so many anamacha, that there are more people who could be draoi than who are, and that sometimes a draoi has to go where an anamacha might find her.”
“Then I’ll come w
ith you and my husband,” Magaidh told Voada, “and if I find my anamacha, you can teach me.”
“Your children—you’d leave them?” Could I have left Orla and Hakan in order to become draoi? Voada had no answer to that question. Perhaps she could have for a short time, at least, if Meir had been there for them and Una had been watching over them. But this … going into war …
Magaidh’s questions and her insistence brought back echoes of Orla to Voada. She could imagine her daughter asking the same things. She could imagine Orla desperately wanting to know what Voada knew, wanting to become a draoi like her mother.
She wondered if Orla would ever have that experience, and that thought made the world shimmer through the water that filled her eyes.
Magaidh brought her knees up to her chest, hugging them to herself and propping up her chin. Voada knew that she saw the tears gathering. “Don’t worry. The clanfolk will care for my children as if they were their own. They’ll be safe here no matter what happens. Ceanndraoi Voada—”
“Please don’t call me that,” Voada interrupted. She wiped at her eyes as if they’d betrayed her.
“Others will name you that soon enough,” Magaidh told her. She took in a long breath. “I’ve felt something missing inside me for a long time now. I thought the children Comhnall gave me would fill that space, and they’re wonderful, and I do love them, but that emptiness is still there. I think … I know that it’s the part of me that is supposed to be draoi. Please, help me to find that.”
Her sincerity and her need tugged at Voada. Even Voada’s anamacha stirred, touching her enough that she could hear their voices.
The Moonshadow’s voice was gone from the chorus. For that, Voada was grateful. I felt her once, and that was enough. I’ll be careful and never call her again.
Voada sighed and gave Magaidh a tight-lipped smile. “I’ll help you,” she said.
PART THREE
ALBANN DEAS
21
The Battle of Muras
VOADA AND MAOL SPENT the next moon moving from one clan to another, crisscrossing Albann Bràghad and asking the clan àrds to lend them any fighters or local draoi who wished to join them or for the àrds themselves to join and command their own warriors. Voada told her tale hands upon hands of times as she had to the Mac Tsagairt clan: outlining their plan to attack the south, telling them whose anamacha she held, and demonstrating the power her anamacha could command. She heeded Greum’s warnings and avoided calling forth Leagsaidh Moonshadow again, instead continuing to use Iomhar as her conduit to the anamacha’s power.
It seemed Magaidh had been right; Voada found herself being called “Ceanndraoi” very quickly as news spread that a new draoi held Leagsaidh Moonshadow’s anamacha.
And soon it was Voada rather than Maol Iosa to whom the clanfolk most listened. Her story—the loss of her children, her desire to recover them, her anger and resentment of the Mundoa who had done this to her—sparked the northern clans’ ire and passion. She became the figurehead around which this new rebellion began to coalesce. She was its leader, a strange sensation to her. But as the days went on and more clans came to them, she slowly became more comfortable with the role.
After all, it was Elia who had guided her fate. Moonshadow’s anamacha had come to her unbidden. As Greum Red-Hand had told her, it wasn’t the draoi who was powerful but the anamacha that draoi held. Voada gave herself up to the path that had been laid before her.
“Join us!” was the song she and Ceannàrd Iosa crooned over and over around communal village fires and around tables. “Join us!” The clan àrds listened, if grudgingly at times. They listened, and they responded; a few at first, then more, and finally a flood. The news of their call to arms traveled faster than Voada and Maol and their ever-larger entourage, passed on and enhanced by word of mouth. They soon found the àrds and the clanfolk waiting for them when their burgeoning army arrived in a new place.
They also heard the news from Onglse: how the battle for the island continued, with Commander Savas’ army pressing slowly but steadily inland. Of Voada and Maol’s betrayal, nothing was said at all; the gossip remained silent on that. The rumors were that the Mundoan army had breached the second wall but had been thrown back again; that the battles were fierce and wild; that Ceanndraoi Greum Red-Hand himself had been injured, though the details on his injuries and their seriousness varied wildly depending on who was telling the tale; that Great-Voice Vadim III in Trusa had sent even more troops to Savas; that the Red-Hand was renewing his call for help from the clans.
But the clans were now listening to another more seductive voice, and the àrds were witnessing the gathering of an army of the northern clans unlike any they’d seen before. By the time the moon had returned again to full, Voada and Maol found themselves at the head of a formidable force: men and women both, warriors and a few draoi, though fewer than they’d hoped—most of the draoi, trained in Bàn Cill, had already left to bolster the defense of Onglse. A train of family and camp followers accompanied them as they moved south in earnest.
Toward River Meadham. Toward their first true battle.
The bridge at the town of Muras was one of the few crossings of the River Meadham and was the westernmost point at which the river could be crossed on foot, horse, or cart. Beyond Muras Bridge, the Meadham became too deep for fording, too wide to be bridged, and the current too strong to fight. Even at Muras, the bridge was only possible because it was actually two bridges, one coming from the Albann Bràghad bank and one from the Albann Deas side where the town proper sat. Both bridges linked to a large island in the center of the Meadham, clustered with shops and inns.
There was one additional ford not far west from the confluence of the River Yarrow that was seasonal and erratic; the clans largely avoided that ford after years of losing carts, horses, and those who were unable to swim when the water was too high. The other more reliable fords were all east of the Yarrow.
Too far for the Cateni army. No—lacking ships, they would have to cross over the bridge at Muras.
The army—hands of clanspeople beyond counting—had encamped a half day’s march north of the river. Voada had sent a few of the family groups ahead to Muras to report on the military presence in the town; they’d returned that evening, coming to the command tent where Voada and Maol, along with First Àrd Comhnall, the other clan àrds, and the hand and three of draoi, were waiting.
“If they’re aware that we’re here, they don’t show it,” one of the women, wearing a plain bog dress, declared as she took a bowl of stew offered to her by Magaidh—still without anamacha, but often at Voada’s side. “There were only a hand—two at the most—of their soldiers checking those crossing the bridge from this side, and they looked mostly bored. They just watched us, then waved us past. It was the same on the Muras side of the island; not much of a watch on the second bridge.”
The woman’s husband nodded in agreement. “There are more soldiers in Muras itself, of course, but from the numbers of them we counted when we passed the garrison in the town, I’d suspect it’s half a cohort in total. Certainly not many more, and possibly fewer. And the ones we saw there were poor soldiers: too old or too young, most of them, and none of them look used to war or fighting.”
“The Mundoa,” another woman said, and spat on the ground at the word, “won’t cross north past the island unless they must, and the Cateni who go into Muras from the north to sell their sheep and grain would say nothing about us even if they knew.”
Maol looked at Voada, who nodded. “You all have our thanks,” Maol said to them. “Go, take more food and rest. Tomorrow … well, we’ll see what that brings.” They bowed and left the tent, and Maol turned to Voada and the àrds. “Ceanndraoi?” he asked Voada. “I rode close enough to see the bridges and the approaches myself. My worry as ceannàrd is that bridges themselves are our main tactical problem, not the garrison there. Once our forces cross the final
ridgeline, there’ll be nothing but the floodplain of the Meadham in front of us—we’ll be seen well before we reach the bridges. The Mundoa don’t even need soldiers; if those defending Muras can take down the bridge, we’ll be trapped on this side of the Meadham for leagues. If I were defending Muras, I would have made certain that the bridges could be destroyed quickly either by my soldiers or by the sihirki.”
“The sihirki,” one of the draoi—Tormod, a tall young man with hair the color of ripe hay—“are nothing to the draoi.” He spat on the ground in front of him.
“And how many sihirki have you actually pitted yourself against, Draoi Tormod?” Voada asked, her voice as cutting as the edge of a honed axe. Tormod scowled and dropped his gaze to examine the matted grass and mud beneath his feet; to Voada’s eyes, his anamacha seemed to shudder. “I know the sihirki well. I’ve been in battle against them. Yes, they’re weaker than we draoi, but to think them powerless is simple foolishness.”
Even as she spoke the words, she felt a coldness fill her: the anamacha’s presence.
“But,” she said after a pause, “it is the draoi who can overcome our ceannàrd’s worry. Ceannàrd Iosa, here are my thoughts …”
Just before dawn, a fog crawled through and over the tall birches and oaks of the ridgeline opposite Muras, cascading down the verdant slope and onto the meadows and grazing fields of River Meadham’s floodplain. Like a gray, cloud-wrapped wave under the moonlight and stars, it swept toward Muras Bridge, moving far more quickly than any natural fog.
The best and most competent soldiers of the local garrison had been sent to Commander Savas at Onglse half a moon ago by the local Voice; those who remained in Muras were grizzled veterans near the age of retirement or raw and largely untrained recruits. The night watch at the Muras Bridge’s entrance on the Albann Bràghad side of the Meadham consisted of a hand of soldiers: two hardly more than boys, the other three men in their fourth decade, scarred and wearied by their time in the army. All of them were bored. Muras hadn’t seen a battle with the Cateni since the Mundoa had taken the town generations ago; the watches on the bridge had long ago become used to uneventful nights. They were all inside the guard house—three of them engaged in a game of zar atmak, casting bone dice on the table and wagering the few coins in their purses, while the remaining two huddled against the stone walls, snoring. All of them had loosened or even removed their armor; what need was there for its heaviness during the long, monotonous nights when travelers only rarely came to the bridge?
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