Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  A few of the lairds, when they rose to speak, caused the others to at least moderate their noise. One was Laird O’Blathmhaic himself, and two others: an ancient man named Woulfe, so thin that he looked like a stick of dried, smoked meat, who was the clan-laird of the lands east of the Bunús Wall; and a woman named MacCanna who, except for the white color of the long hair tightly bound in a long rope down her back, appeared to be no more than Kayne’s mam’s age, and who led the clansfolk of the region of the lowering hills just beyond the Narrows.

  “. . . and the truth is that if we do as Laird O’Blathmhaic asks, then it will be my people who suffer the most, because we’re closest to Airgialla,” Banlaird MacCanna was saying, and the clansfolk at the table with her cheered and pounded the table with their fists in agreement.

  “You hillfolk are half lowlanders anyway,” a man called out from the clouds of pipeweed. “You’ve forgotten how to fight.”

  Shouts erupted all around, but in one swift motion MacCanna stood and slipped a throwing knife from its scabbard at her belt, flinging the weapon through the thick air. The blade landed quivering, embedded in the table a finger’s width from the hand of the man who had just spoken. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said drolly into the silence, as the man stared at the knife. “I was aiming for that large gut of yours.”

  Loud laughter followed as MacCanna strode across the room to snatch back her knife. “I’m not saying that the clansfolk shouldn’t fight to remove the foot of the Rí Airgialla from our necks,” she said as she made her way back to her seat. “I just don’t know that now is the time.”

  “What better time, when the Tuatha are all in a turmoil and fighting among themselves?” O’Blathmhaic answered. “We may not see a better time again.”

  “You don’t know that, Liam,” someone shouted back. “I was surprised the Healer Ard lasted as long as she did. My bet is that there’s already a new Rí Ard on the throne, and one of the Ríthe holding Lámh Shábhála as well. If that’s the case, we’ll have the damned Great Stone against us.”

  Laird Woulfe stood, banging the head of his walking stick hard against the oaken table in front of him so that everyone turned to him. “An’ if what the young Tiarna says is true, then we’ll want the Great Stone here. Everyone here has seen the beasties that attacked Ceangail, and I remember how many gardai rode down the High Road to Céile Mhór a year ago and how few of them have returned.”

  Banlaird MacCanna rose again. “Then if we need the Great Stone to help us and not fight us, perhaps we’d best leave things as they are.”

  O’Blathmhaic scoffed. “Aye, and be begging the Tuatha and tugging our forelocks and asking them nicely to come to our rescue when those Arruk come snarling around our villages again.”

  With that, everyone started talking at once, the uproar seeming to shake dust from the ceiling. Séarlait tugged at Kayne’s sleeve and inclined her head toward the door of the tavern. Harik saw the motion. “Go on if you want to,” he told Kayne. “Stay close; if you’re needed, I’ll come for you. This is going to go on for another few stripes, at least.” Kayne wondered what else Harik might be thinking, but there was nothing in his face to reveal it.

  “I’ll be just outside,” Kayne told him, speaking loudly to be heard over the din of the clansfolks’ discussion. Harik nodded. Séarlait was already at the door and Kayne went to her. He glanced back at the room just before he left and found both O’Blathmhaic’s and Harik’s gazes on him.

  He let the door shut behind him.

  Outside, the main street of Ceangail was quiet, and the West Gate of the town was open. Oil lamps had been lit on the poles of the gate and along the street. Séarlait was walking toward the gate, and Kayne hurried after her. He expected her to take his arm as he came alongside her, as any of the bantiarna back in Dún Laoghaire would have done. She did not, though she stayed close to his side. Several of the townsfolk were still out, and they nodded to Séarlait as if they knew her before giving Kayne a more careful and guarded greeting.

  “Tiarna Kayne!” He heard the woman’s voice in the shadows of the street; a flicker of motion and she was embracing him, her long light-brown hair a glossy tangle at his chest. “I heard you’d returned, and I was so glad. I was hoping so much that I’d see you.” Her face lifted, the features warm in lamplight, smiling, and she went to tiptoes to kiss him—a quick, almost shy kiss on the cheek. Her arm curled around Kayne’s. “I’ve thought of you every night since.”

  He remembered her then, the lass he’d taken to his bed that night in Ceangail. Séarlait had taken a step away from the two of them, her expression carefully guarded. The young woman saw Séarlait also, and her arm tightened around Kayne’s, possessively. “I could stay with you now,” she said. “If you’d like . . .” She smiled up at him hopefully.

  “No,” Kayne said and the smile vanished slowly, like frost in the morning sun. He pulled his arm away from her and she released him reluctantly. “You can’t.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her gaze flicked angrily over to Séarlait. “You’re part of what the lairds are talking about, I know . . . You probably have to speak with them . . . If, later . . .” The smile came and vanished once more. She shifted her weight. “If you’re staying at the inn, I could . . .” One shoulder lifted.

  “No,” Kayne answered. “I’m staying with my men.”

  A nod. She blinked, and Kayne saw tears in the light of the lamps. “Perhaps later, then . . .” He didn’t answer. She nodded again. Her gaze went once more to Séarlait, her lips tightening. “She’s half-wild, that one,” she said to Kayne. “Be careful she doesn’t stab you in the middle of the night.”

  Séarlait hissed at that, taking a step toward the girl, who fled quickly away down the street. Kayne’s hand had gone to Séarlait’s arm as soon as she’d moved, but the gesture was unnecessary; Séarlait had stopped after the first step, watching the young woman’s retreat. She looked down at Kayne’s hand, then up to his face. Her stare was a challenge, and he released her.

  Séarlait spun around and began walking. She didn’t look at him at all, but strode out just past the West Gate and stopped there in the middle of the High Road, looking out over the night-shrouded mountains. Kayne walked over to her, stopping by the wooden frame of the gate. “I slept with her, when I was here. It was just a night. Nothing else.”

  Séarlait didn’t move, didn’t make any motion.

  “It meant nothing. I don’t . . . I don’t even know her name.”

  Séarlait turned. There was fury in her eyes. She tapped herself hard on the chest with her forefinger, then swept her hands out wide as if she were casting something away. He shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he told her. She gave a moue of exasperation and repeated the gesture. She pointed to her damaged throat, to her body. This time he understood.

  “You meant nothing, too,” he said. “To the gardai who raped you.”

  A scowling nod.

  “Are you saying I’m like the beasts who did that to you?” he asked her. He was answered with a brief lift of her shoulder as her head cocked defiantly. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he told her. “I truly am. I would never do anything . . .”

  He took a breath, unable to talk into her glowering, silent anger. Kayne remembered the last time he’d been here, when he and Harik had confronted each other. So much has changed since that time . . . He’d changed: he was no longer the arrogant young tiarna who had once been af fronted by Harik’s bluntness. His life had been shattered on the rocky ground of the Narrows and altered beyond recognition, had been catalyzed and fused in the crucible of grief and loss. Even the landscape to the west seemed to have changed for him: he’d once seen those mountains only as something through which he had to pass to go home. Beyond that, he’d given no thought to them or the people who lived there. Now he owed his very life to the clansfolk, and the mountains seemed a comforting bulwark. “I wish you could tell me everything you’re thinking right now,” he said to Séarlai
t.

  She sniffed as if she found that somehow amusing. Séarlait went to one of the gate posts, taking the oil lamp set there from its iron ring and bringing it over to Kayne. Crouching down in the dirt of the High Road, she placed the lantern down and adjusted the shutters so that it threw a wedge of yellow light on the tight-packed dirt. She smoothed the ground with a hand, then handed Kayne a dagger from her belt. This time she was careful not to let her hand touch his.

  She gestured at the ground, making a motion as if scribbling something.

  “You want me to teach you writing now?” Kayne felt the heavy weight of the blade in his hand. She stared at him. “All right,” he said. He plunged the tip of the dagger into the hard ground and made a mark. “There are eighteen letters in the alphabet . . .”

  He taught her, crouching in the dirt of Ceangail until the mage-lights came and he had to fill Blaze.

  20

  The Blue Ghosts

  “YOU’RE SCARED OF ME,” Ennis said to the Clannhra and Unnisha. He sniffed, the tears still wet on his cheeks. The Clannhra had taken him to the wagons, ushering him away from Isibéal’s body even though he could see that the woman tried to avoid actually touching him. Unnisha had come at Clannhra Ata’s call, and the two of them had taken Ennis into the Clannhra’s wagon while others of the clan—making a warding motion with their fingers toward him when they thought he wasn’t looking—had gone down to dispose of Isibéal’s body. As Ennis sat in the nest of warm and brightly colored blankets in the wagon, huddling in the corner where only the fitful light of a lantern could find him, his fingers played with Treoraí’s Heart. Both women’s eyes were caught there. He knew it was because his hands were still sticky with Isibéal’s blood, his léine and skin stained to the elbow. “It wasn’t my fault. I saw the pattern, and I only followed it.”

  “The pattern?” Ata asked. Ennis nodded, his small head bobbing up and down. “I don’t understand.”

  “The blue ghosts, Clannhra. Didn’t you see them?”

  Unnisha glanced at the Clannhra, who shrugged stiffly. Ennis started to cry again, knowing he couldn’t explain.

  The blue ghosts. The patterns . . .

  Sometimes, when he looked just the right way, he could see them: glowing blue outlines that swirled around him. They surrounded him like a mist or a fog, but it wasn’t a fog. He didn’t have the words for the vision. The ghosts surrounded him in space, searingly bright close to him, and fading to nothingness the farther out they went, transparent and overlaying the more colorful world of reality and full of shadowy images of possibility. The blue ghosts also surrounded him in time: again, very bright if the moment were only a few breaths away and growing increasingly hazy and indistinct the further from Now it was.

  He’d seen them long before he’d known what they were, beginning perhaps a year after his talk with Keira. Their appearances were rare, then, but even then he’d realized that if he could find a ghost that looked like himself, a ghost whose pattern in the time dance led to a place Ennis wanted to be, he could link himself to it. It was like Keira had told him: he could see what would happen, and if he did exactly what the blue ghost did, that future would come true. He could follow the dance of the blue ghost and he would be fine. He’d thought at first—like any child might—that everyone saw the blue ghosts at times, that they all saw the patterns, that all the strange things adults did was because they were tied to their own dances. It had been a long time before he realized that no one else could see the blue ghosts at all (and he sometimes still forgot), that this was the gift that Keira had said he would have. The gift of the blue caul.

  But since he’d woken during Isibéal’s flight from Dún Laoghaire, the ghosts had become more clear and sharp than they had ever been, so clear that they frightened him into silence. When he and Isibéal had come out from the hummock, when the Clannhra had started to speak . . .

  He’d seen several images of himself, fading out to the future. In at least one, he was dead; in most of the others, he was captured and handed over to grim gardai. But in one, he saw Clannhra Ata helping him, and he’d followed that ghost, as he was supposed to. He put himself in that future’s pattern and let the blue ghost speak for him, guide his actions.

  It wasn’t him who had killed Isibéal; it was the blue ghost. He had no choice; that was the path that would keep him safe.

  Following the patterns. Like Isibéal’s dances . . .

  The ghosts and their haze were still around him, swirling, and now he was afraid of them. Too many places, and so many of them awful . . . “You wouldn’t understand,” he said to the Clannhra and Unnisha. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . I miss my mam . . .” He began to sob, unable to stop himself. The blue ghosts of his mam had been the most horrible of all. He saw her dead in all of the images that surrounded her, every one, for the last hand of days. He’d searched everywhere for a blue ghost where she was alive and couldn’t find one, and so he had chosen the pattern where she seemed to suffer the least. If Isibéal had not done what she’d done, someone else would have acted, so Ennis had blindly followed the pattern that bound Isibéal and himself, afraid that if he stepped out of it once or said the wrong thing, that one of the other patterns would sweep over them and Mam would die horribly, screaming in agony like some of the blue ghosts of her.

  He was glad that hadn’t happened. He was glad he had given Mam a quiet, peaceful death. His tears were as much of joy as sorrow.

  He heard Unnisha give a long sigh and her arms came around him. He let himself sink into her embrace. She smelled strangely, but the embrace reminded him of his mam and he let himself sink into the embrace.

  He didn’t tell her that he’d seen this pattern, too, that when he’d taken the knife from Isibéal and let himself link with the ghost, he’d glimpsed Unnisha in the sea-fog, holding him well off in the azure distance of time, almost as far away as he could see clearly. He sniffed again, turning his head so he could see the Clannhra. A glowing outline of the Clannhra leaned back away from him; a breath later the Clannhra herself did the same, and he heard her words in the sapphire wash of sound before he heard it with his ears.

  “What you did to Isibéal ...” The Clannhra visibly shuddered. “I couldn’t believe that a child . . .”

  “She killed my mam,” Ennis explained to her. “The patterns, the blue ghosts, told me. It was what I was supposed to do. I just let myself follow the pattern. I let it take me. It did it, not me.” The Clannhra was shaking her head. The ghosts around the Clannhra shifted to bloody red, as they did rarely, and he knew somehow that he was seeing the past: a young woman who would be the Clannhra, standing weeping over the body of a man; a flash that made Ennis blink and gasp, and there was the Clannhra again, a few years older, her face stern and unforgiving as she watched another man clutching at his throat, the remnants of a meal before him, his eyes wide with fright and his mouth open as he gaped at the Clannhra.

  Then the ghosts went blue again. The patterns of them in the near future whispered to him, and he spoke the words. “Isibéal killed my mam, and so I killed her. That’s fair, isn’t it?” He sniffed, wiping at his nose and looking up at her with wide, pleading eyes. “What if a person murdered someone you loved, Clannhra?” he asked her. “Wouldn’t you kill that person if you could?”

  The Clannhra drew her breath in with a sound like a boiling teakettle. Unnisha, stroking Ennis’ head and cradling him, spoke. “He doesn’t know, Clannhra. He can’t.”

  “You weren’t there this morning when he killed Isibéal,” Ata answered. “He spoke your name, Unnisha. He knew you’d lost Kellsean. Who can guess what the boy knows, or how, or what he intends?”

  “He’s just a child, Clannhra,” Unnisha protested. “Not much more than a baby.” Her hand covered his head, pressing him against her breast. He put his arms around her, still snuffling. Now Unisha was crying with him; he could hear the tears within her and feel them throbbing in her body. “Maybe there’s a reason the Mother-Creator made Isibé
al bring him here.”

  “Isibéal was to—” Ennis heard her swallow the next word. “—leave him with his mam.”

  “But she chose not to. Clannhra, he’s just a child who’s been through a horrible experience—one we helped bring to him. Just a child . . .” She hugged him harder, rocking back and forth as they both cried.

  “He can’t stay with us. It’s not safe, not with the gardai out scouring the land looking for him. And that cloch around his neck . . .”

  Ennis heard the whispers of the blue ghosts, saw them moving. In the haze of the distance, he saw a moment he liked and he let himself fall into the pattern, sitting up in Unnisha’s lap and wiping at the tears. “I want to stay with you,” he told Unnisha, looking up at her. “I want to stay here and not go back.” Voices whispered and he spoke the words. “I’m afraid to go back. They’re all dead. All my family. I don’t have anyone else . . . My mam . . . I don’t have a mam . . .”

  “Clannhra?” Unnisha whispered.

  “It’s too dangerous,” the woman insisted.

  “No, Clannhra,” Ennis said earnestly. The ghosts shifted around him; he listened to their voices and found the pattern again. “You could change the way I look, couldn’t you, Unnisha?” The pattern lent his words a mournful pleading. “Couldn’t you give me a new name? You could call me . . .” The blue ghosts spoke the name. “. . . Fiodóir.”

  Ata snorted. “You know that name?” she asked, and Ennis nodded his head.

  “Fiodóir is the son of the Mother-Creator, the one who weaves the tapestry of Fate,” he told her. “That’s what Isibéal told me.”

  Clannhra Ata gave another snort, then sat back. She pulled a pipe from her pocket, loaded it with pipeweed, then leaned forward to light it over the lantern’s flame. She exhaled a cloud of fragrant smoke that drifted through the blue ghosts. She blinked. He waited for her to say what he heard the blue ghost around her say. “You have a cloch.”