Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  “Edana—”

  She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I don’t care where you go, Doyle. Go to Lár Bhaile and celebrate with Rí Mallaghan and the Order. I don’t care. Just don’t come back to Dún Laoghaire. This is my Tuath, and I am still Banrion here. I expect you’ll be returning for the Óenach to elect the new Rí Ard, but from now and forever, no matter what, you and I will be as strangers. I’m disgusted that I ever thought I could love you.”

  Doyle found that a righteous anger could manage to dull the hurt and mask the guilt. “If that’s your wish, Banrion,” Doyle answered, emphasizing the title. He gave her a mock bow. “You think too simply, Edana. That’s always been your problem. I don’t like what’s happened, but I couldn’t keep Meriel alive by myself. I made a choice for the good of both of us. I’ll tell you now that if I hadn’t made that choice, you wouldn’t be Banrion Dún Laoghaire; you’d be lying there alongside Meriel. You’re alive because I was willing to help those who wanted Meriel deposed. And if you don’t watch your words carefully in the future . . .” He stopped.

  “Sometimes, Doyle, things are simple. If I’d known what was planned, I’d have been willing to die with Meriel, if that was what was necessary. I’m loyal to those I truly love, Doyle, loyal enough that I will stand with them no matter the consequences. You, of all people, should remember that.” She glared at him; he held her gaze. She didn’t understand. She would never understand. Doyle stared back at her as he might at a stranger. “I don’t know if you came to gloat or just to make certain that Meriel was truly dead, but now you know,” Edana continued. “Leave, Doyle. Leave me alone with her to grieve. At least I have genuine sorrow for the loss of a friend.”

  “I have the same sorrow and the same grief, Edana, whether you’ll believe it or not,” he answered. He looked again at the bier. Emotions warred inside. Aye, he was truly sorry that Meriel was dead. She had been an innocent caught up in this. But other thoughts intruded on the sorrow. Where is Ennis? Where is the Heart?

  Edana scoffed mockingly at him as he gazed down at Meriel’s face, and Doyle shrugged. “I’ll go, then,” he said. He nodded to her, glanced a final time at Meriel’s body, and spun on the balls of his feet, his clóca swirling with the motion. As he reached the doors and knocked for the hall garda to open them, he heard her call out behind him.

  “I grieve most of all for you, Doyle,” she said. “All Meriel lost was her life.”

  He had no answer for that, or rather, too many. The door opened, the garda in the corridor bowing his head. Doyle stepped through the doors as he heard Edana begin to sob once more.

  The Draíodóiri were attired in their most ornate robes, with gilded torcs engraved with the Mother’s sign around their necks. The priests droned on and on, their voices as thick as honey syrup. Doyle shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, standing next to Edana alongside Meriel’s bier, now placed atop a pile of oil-drenched logs. The smell of the oil was strong and even the salt breeze off the bay did little to ease the stench. The odor combined with the over-strong perfume on Meriel’s corpse and churned the stomachs of those closest to the bier. Many of the Riocha held cloths up to their noses and mouths; Edana’s face was pale, though that might simply have been grief. Doyle tried to lose himself in the vista from high on Temple Hill, but the sun glancing off the waters of Dún Laoghaire Bay threatened to add to the internal sledgehammer blows that slammed into his forehead with every beat of his heart. He tried to massage the headache away with his fingers; it did little to help. Edana glanced at him: cold and unsympathetic and distant.

  The Draíodóiri continued to chant.

  The burning ground near the temple was packed; the city of Dún Laoghaire seemed to have been emptied of its inhabitants, all of them out here to watch the Healer Ard’s body be given back to the Mother. Afterward, the ashes and bones would move in procession to the waiting barrow-grave on Cnocareilig. The mood was solemn but also tense. It was obvious to Doyle that the rumors of how Meriel had died and who might have been responsible had spread farther and deeper into the populace than any of them had expected. There was submerged anger on the faces of the watching multitudes, and the Riocha in their fine clóca shifted uneasily near the bier, seeing how large the crowd had grown. All the gardai in the city had been put on alert and the ranks near the temple watched carefully, ready to intervene. Doyle noticed that those of the Riocha who had clochs na thintrí kept their hands close to the gems. Swords were forbidden by custom, but there were more “ornamental” daggers on the belts around Doyle than usual.

  Doyle knew what the people saw and the conclusions they might draw from it. Even if the news of the Mad Holder’s evident demise and the other deaths within her family hadn’t yet become common knowledge, the absence of Meriel’s husband Owaine or any of her children was conspicuous, as well as the lack of any of the Ríthe except Edana.

  They knew. They knew that their beloved Healer Ard hadn’t died accidentally: choking on her food while dining privately. That had been the official story Doyle had circulated, but too many servants on the Ard’s staff suspected or knew the truth, and while Edana hadn’t refuted the official story, neither had she echoed it. And Ennis—the pretense that he and his nursemaid had gone to relatives for a month was belied by the gardai out searching for them and the questions they asked—and Doyle knew that Edana had her personal gardai out looking for the boy, a fact that Doyle wasn’t going to relay to Rí Mallaghan or the others. By now, no doubt, the rumors of the deaths of Meriel’s other children were probably swirling around the town, and soon would come word of the Mad Holder’s death, and of the battle in the Narrows of the Finger.

  They knew; the tuathánach, the commoners. They knew that this had been a coup, that the Banrion Ard they’d come to love had been killed by her political enemies, at least some of whom were now standing next to her body pretending to grieve. Such assassinations had happened often enough in the history of Dún Loaghaire and the Ards, but not in the lifetime of those here now.

  They’d let Meriel live too long, rule too long. Doyle had never wanted this to happen at all, but if it must happen, it should have been a double hand of years ago, not now. Every healing Meriel had performed had made her more popular with the tuathánach, had made them love her and identify with her just a little more.

  He closed his eyes against the headache.

  The Draíodóiri finished their chanting. The head of the group, an old woman with a prominent hump between her shoulder blades, lit several pots of incense around the bier with a torch brought out from the sacred fire within the temple. The incense only added to the stench, and several of those closest coughed loudly as fragrant streams of smoke rose in the still air. The old Draíodóir came up to Edana and handed her the torch. “Banrion . . .” Her rheumy eyes glanced over to Doyle as she stepped back. Doyle thought he saw disgust in her gaze.

  Edana took the torch and approached the bier. Where each of the pots of incense were set, she touched the flames of the torch to the wood. Flames licked at the oil and by the time Edana had gone around the pyre, the logs were already burning furiously. The Riocha stepped back, away from the furious heat and smoke. The flames had reached the bier, the curling heat whipping the gauze curtains around the body, then they caught, revealing the body just as the first tongues of fire reached it.

  A sigh went up from the massed throats of the crowd.

  Something struck Doyle in the back of the head, so hard an impact that his vision blurred, the new pain momentarily banishing his headache. He gave a cry and brought his hand up reflexively; his fingers came away stained with blood. He blinked, the headache redoubling in intensity and roaring now in his head. Another rock struck his shoulder as he turned; at the same time, a bantiarna went to her knees just to Doyle’s right, clutching the side of her face as blood poured between her fingers. The moan of the crowd became an angry howl, and more rocks rained down on the Riocha. The gardai surged forward with pikes to force the crowd away, but th
ey resisted as the press of the mob impaled themselves on the front ranks of the pikes and brought them down. The line of gardai broke and the crowd pushed forward once more. Doyle could hear the shouts as the rocks continue to pelt them: “The Riocha killed her! Revenge the Healer Ard! Give her justice!”

  The mob charged up the slope, so close he could see their faces.

  A Cloch Mór was unleashed: a false wind howled and flung a section of the crowd back. Doyle grasped Snapdragon as another rock thudded to the ground in front of him. The golden dragon rose, snarling, in the narrowing space between the crowd and the Riocha. “Edana!” he shouted. “Your cloch—use it now!”

  From the corner of his vision, he saw her shake her head. Her forehead was bloodied from a rock, and there were spatters of red on the torc of Dún Laoghaire that she wore. “I won’t,” she told. “I won’t use my cloch against them, not when she only used hers for them.”

  “Edana, don’t be stupid,” Doyle said, taking his attention away from the crowd for a moment. Another rock hit him in the side as he turned and the dragon roared with his pain. The crowd surged uneasily around the beast. “We could all die here!”

  Edana shook her head. She folded her arms, giving her back to both Doyle and crowd and staring at the pyre that was rapidly consuming Meriel’s body. Black, thick smoke drifted over them, hiding the sky. Doyle uttered a wordless shout of frustration. He scowled and the mage-dragon reared back, spitting fire at the scant open ground between the Riocha and the mob. The crowd gave way at that, and retreated farther when the dragon’s barbed tail lashed out at the front ranks, taking several of them down. More rocks were arcing toward them, but the mage-wind caught them and hurled them back into the crowd. A clochmion opened: tiny fireballs rained down at the front ranks of the mob just past the gardai. There were screams, but the mob was no longer moving forward.

  The crowd’s mood shifted suddenly from rage to panic. The front ranks of the tuathánach closest to the pyre turned and tried to retreat, colliding with those still pushing forward from behind. The gardai, heartened by the support of their leaders, charged at the crowd once more.

  “Clear the hilltop!” Doyle shouted to them. The barrage of rocks had stopped; the crowd had turned entirely from the twin threats of the gardai and the Riocha with their clochs, fleeing down Temple Hill toward the warrens of Dún Laoghaire. Those few who stood their ground were trampled by their own or clubbed down by the gardai. Doyle sent the mage-dragon rushing through the air at the rear of the retreat—people screamed and fell to the ground as the great wings brushed close to them, then picked themselves up again and ran.

  The retreat became a rout.

  Doyle released Snapdragon. The yellow dragon snarled one last time and vanished into wind and vapor. His headache was gone, banished with the adrenaline of the attack. “They’ll think twice about doing anything like that again,” Doyle said. “We’ll have the gardai take those responsible and we’ll make an example of them—” He stopped; Edana wasn’t listening to him.

  She was watching the pyre. The logs groaned and hissed, collapsing into a gout of smoke and bright sparks. The bier tilted and fell into the center of glowing ash and coals, surrounded by flame.

  He heard Edana sigh.

  “This is how it all will end,” she said.

  PART TWO:

  DIVISION

  15

  On the Stepping Stones

  THE SEA WAS BITTER cold and rough, then quickly warm and quiet. Salt water poured like liquid fire into the open wounds on her back and arm. She opened her mouth to scream, but water entered her throat and she was losing consciousness, drifting down, down into the heavy embrace of the sea and drowning. A strange calm came over her and she closed her eyes, accepting this death and wondering at the dark shapes that came and hovered around her. “Are you the black haunts, come to take me to the Mother?” she asked, but they didn’t answer . . .

  Sevei awoke with a gasp. Her body flopped strangely, and she realized that she wasn’t in human form but that of a seal, though she could feel the comforting weight of the clochmion Dragoncaller still around her neck. A half dozen other seals lay on the rocks around her, but these weren’t the common brown harbor seals she’d seen before. These were far larger: magnificent creatures with fur so black that the light reflecting from their coats seemed to strike blue highlights. She realized what they were even as their large, intelligent and coal-black eyes turned to her: Saimhóir. The blue seals.

  The largest of them, a bull, waddled awkwardly over to her. His flipper touched her body.

  “So you’re awake at last,” he said, but as she heard his deep voice speaking in her language in her head, she realized that her ears were hearing the grunts and moans of a seal. As if he guessed at her thoughts, she heard him chuckle. “You can understand me because I speak through Bradán an Chumhacht, which is for the Saimhóir what Lámh Shabhála is for you stone-walkers. I am Bhralhg, who swallowed Bradán an Chumhacht after Challa released it, many cycles ago now.”

  “Challa . . .” The name seemed familiar to Sevei, but as she spoke the name, the syllables were slurred and unrecognizable coming from her mouth. Bhralhg chuckled again.

  “Just think what you wish to say,” he said/thought to her. “With Bradán an Chumhacht, I can understand you. You knew Challa?” His voice sounded puzzled or surprised. “She hated stone-walkers, and avoided all contact with them.”

  “I know her name, that’s all,” Sevei said. “My mam . . . she told me about Dhegli and Challa. And my gram—”

  “We know your great-mam,” Bhralhg answered, his voice turning grim. “She was the Holder of Lámh Shábhála, the stone-walker called Jenna. Challa hated her most of all.”

  With the mention of Jenna, the memories flooded back to Sevei: her great-uncle’s confrontation, the golden mage-dragon, and the sight of her gram toppling over the rail of the ship. Bhralhg moaned and grumbled next to her, as if he saw those images himself. “We’d come out from the Nesting Land to see what brought so many sky-stones together,” he said to her. “That’s why we were there. When we saw the two of you, we thought you were two Saimhóir, lost and battered in the storm, so we took you to the surface and brought you here. It wasn’t until later that we realized . . .” He stopped. “The Holder is here also, but she is badly injured in both body and mind, and she no longer has Lámh Shábhála. Whether she will live or not will be the WaterMother’s choice alone.”

  “Gram is here? Where? I need to see her.” Sevei willed herself to change so that she could stand and run to her, but Bhralhg touched her again and his voice sounded in her head.

  “No,” he said, almost gruffly. “You have none of the dead things that stone-walkers wear against the cold and you’re still injured. Stay in this form; it will be most comfortable for you. Come, follow me . . .” His flipper moved away from her and his voice faded into the grunting of a seal. He laboriously dragged himself across the rocky shore to the water, splashing into the waves and vanishing with a flip of his tail. Sevei followed him—she could feel the scabbed wounds from the mage-spears pulling at her back as she moved—and dove into the embrace of the waves.

  In the shifting light under the waves, she saw Bhralhg waiting for her, resting on kelp-draped stones farther out. She went to him, luxuriating in the feel of the water even though the salt burned in her wounds. She followed Bhralhg around a small outthrust foot of the land. He paused, waiting for the surge of the next wave, then let it carry him in a wash of foam to the shore as he hauled out on a flat rock. Sevei paused, then followed him with the next wave, striking the rocks harder than she wanted and mewling as her already-savaged body scraped over stone. As the wave slid reluctantly away, she saw her gram.

  “She wouldn’t stay in our form, even though we told her to,” Bhralhg said, leaning his body against hers so that their bodies touched and his voice entered her mind again. “We could have helped her more that way, though we did what we could. The Holder is stubborn, even in
her pain. None of us were surprised by that; the Holder Jenna has figured large in the tales we’ve told since Bradán an Chumhacht awakened again.”

  “No, I’m not surprised either,” Sevei told him. Jenna lay huddled in the lee of several large gray boulders. The Saimhóir had draped kelp over her body so that only her head was exposed, her graying hair wild and crusted with salt. Even so, Sevei could see her shivering, the kelp blanket trembling over her. “How long ago did you bring us here?”

  “One brightness ago. Not long after the warmlight came to the sky, other stone-walkers came here searching for you—the ones from the wooden islands that move, not the ones who live nearest here—but I used Bradán an Chumhacht to hide you and us from their eyes.”

  Sevei nodded. Jenna moaned softly, her eyes fluttering open, and Sevei let herself fall back into human form. Shivering and naked, she moved quickly to Jenna. Crouching next to the woman, she stroked her cheek—distressingly hot to Sevei’s touch—and whispered to the bloodshot, swollen eyes that peered at her. “I’m here, Gram.”

  “Sevei?” Her voice was as cracked as her lips. Flies droned around her, lifting in irritation before landing again out of reach as Sevei brushed at them. “You survived, then . . .” Jenna tried to laugh, but it turned to a cough and Sevei saw flecks of blood spray from her mouth.

  “Aye, I survived,” she told Jenna, lifting the strands of kelp to look at her body then letting them drop down again with a grimace. Her great-mam’s body was a mass of seeping, open sores, much of the skin burned and dead, the deep wounds from the mage-dragon’s teeth and claws filled with yellow pus. Maggots already writhed along the edges of the worst wounds. Sevei fought the urge to vomit, pressing her lips together and swallowing bile. “We have to get you to a healer, Gram,” she said. She looked to Bhralhg, who remained where he was, his expressionless black eyes regarding them. “There may be a village nearby, or I could swim to find someone. The Saimhóir might know . . .”