Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (15 page)

But the gate
was
open and the gardai were inside out of the weather, and she was able to resist the temptation to take out the Heart and lift it to the mage-lights. Isibéal ducked her head, maneuvering the horse through the low, thick-walled gap and out beyond the wall. There were few houses here and no town wall, only the shoulder of Cnocareilig and the dark hills beyond, swaddled in mist, beckoned with the promise of escape.

Isibéal clutched Ennis tighter and kicked the horse into a gallop.

KAYNE WASN’T sure when he realized that something was wrong. As their small troop approached the larger Airgialla force between the craggy, fissured walls of the Narrows pass, he could feel a prickling unease lift the hairs on the back of his neck and on his arms. He wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that the Airgiallaians stopped as soon as they caught sight of his da’s gardai, or the fact that the troops were set in battle formation even here in their own Tuath, or maybe it was the stiff way the Riocha riders nearest the banner sat on their horses. Perhaps it was the oppressive feel of the sky, the clouds gathering in twilight.

Owaine waved to the riders.

“Ho, Airgialla! Tiarna Geraghty of Dún Laoghaire greets you,” Owaine called. “Kayne, unfurl your mam’s banner.”

Kayne saw the lifting of bows behind the front ranks then, and the warning he shouted—
“Da!”
—was a breath too late. Arrows hissed and fell in a deadly, hard rain. Kayne heard a grunt alongside him and the rider to his right toppled from his horse with an arrow feathering his chest. Horses and men screamed—a hand of gardai and as many horses were down as Kayne whipped his head around to look. “Take cover!” Kayne shouted. “Shields!” He ripped his own shield from where it hung on his livery as bowstrings sang the deadly note once more. Kayne brought his shield up to protect his and Gainmheach’s heads.

A Cloch Mór opened: Da with Blaze. The second flight of arrows vanished in flame as a sheet of fire rippled before the Airgiallaians. “Stop!” he heard his da shout to them. “We are friends, going to the Banrion Ard—” but the riders brought their lances down and charged as another flight of arrows darkened the sky.

Kayne saw his da’s hesitation. “Da!”

Owaine seemed to shake himself. He held Blaze high. Arrows vanished to ash and lightning arced out to meet the riders, striking the front ranks. Kayne shielded his eyes from the awful flash and roar of the Cloch Mór. Kayne could hear the riders scream, as he’d heard the Arruk scream when Owaine had used the cloch on them, but more riders were coming and foot soldiers charged behind them. The attackers poured down the slope of the pass toward them, a deadly wave of leather and steel.

Too many. Too many to face with the few gardai they had and the wounded.

“Retreat!” he heard his da shout, waving at Kayne and the others. “Kayne, lead them! I’ll hold them back!”

“I’m staying with you.”

“
Do
it!”

Scowling, Kayne yanked at Gainmheach’s reins and gestured to the other gardai. “Back!” he shouted. “Get the wagons turned; riders, stay with them.” He glanced at the landscape around them; there was a narrow cleft in the rocks to the south, leading into the broken slopes where riders and wagons couldn’t go—if they could get there, perhaps they could hide on foot . . . “There!” Kayne cried, pointing. “Make for the opening.”

He heard the crackle of Blaze’s energy behind him, and this time an answer came from where a tiarna sat astride his horse next to the banner holder. Where Owaine wielded fire, the rider hurled ice: a cold wall that to Kayne’s eyes surrounded his da, encasing him in shimmering glacial blue. Kayne knew that name of that cloch: Winter. And he also knew who must then be wielding it: Mal Mac Baoill, the son of Morven Mac Baoill who was the current Rí Airgialla and great-son of old Mal Mac Baoill, also once Rí Airgialla and only three years dead. The implication struck Kayne as it must have come to his da: this was a deliberate betrayal, a planned ambush from which neither Owaine, Kayne, nor the men with them were intended to come through alive.

Blaze gleamed red inside the ice, a dying sun that flared suddenly, melting away rime and frost. Owaine shouted in true fury now, as angry as Kayne had ever seen him. A flare of blood-red arced toward Mac Baoill; it was met by ice halfway, the forces exploding above the onrushing gardai. They screamed and wailed in surprise and pain; several went down, but there were far too many more behind and the momentary gap in the line was filled.

The Airgiallaian riders reached Owaine. He sent searing waves of fire at them and those closest to him went down, but more rushed past him toward Kayne, his companions, and the wagons. They were nearly at the cleft, but Kayne knew they wouldn’t make it. “Turn!” he shouted to the gardai. “Turn and stand!” As one, the soldiers with him gave up all thought of retreat and drew weapons to fight, the wounded rising from their beds to grab swords and hobble from the wagons.

It was slaughter, not battle.

There was no orderly lines here, only a roaring chaos. Kayne blocked a notched sword and hacked at the nameless, grimacing face behind it. He didn’t know if he struck the person or not—perhaps he did, because the rider was gone, but there was another to take his place, and another on the other side. He knocked down a thrust from a lance, shouting in rage as the blade he blocked gouged his thigh rather than running through his abdomen. He could smell the blood; so could Gainmheach, who wickered nervously. Kayne heaved his sword back up in a quick arc and was rewarded with a gurgling cry as his attacker toppled from his mount.

But the garda on the other side of Kayne leaned over, his weapon slicing deep into one of Gainmheach’s rear legs, severing tendons and ripping. The horse screamed, an awful sound that Kayne remembered from other battles, and went down, bearing Kayne to the ground with it. Gainmheach’s body slammed sideways to the rocky ground, Kayne’s leg trapped underneath; he screamed with Gainmheach at the rush of pain. “Up!” he called to the horse, but though Gainmheach tried to rise at the command, it couldn’t. Kayne was pinned. Helpless.

On the ground, Kayne looked up to see another rider in the colors of Airgialla over him, a long lance in his hand. He raised it, ready to plunge it down in Kayne’s body. Kayne tried to roll, but Gainmheach’s weight held him fast.

He looked up at his death, wondering what it would feel like.

It reminded him too much of the dream he’d had at Ceangail.

Crackling lines of fire tore the garda from his seat atop the horse even as the horse went down, the lance’s shaft withering to ash and the steel blade dropping to the ground alongside Kayne’s head. Kayne felt the heat of the blast and the horrible smell of charred horse-and man-flesh. Boots stomped grass near him as someone dismounted. Hands pushed at Gainmheach, helping the horse roll away from Kayne’s leg. Kayne, hissing at the pain of moving the bruised and battered limb, sat up.

Another hand reached down to him; he took it. The Airgiallaian riders had passed beyond them and were wheeling back, and now the foot gardai also approached. They stood in a momentary open space in the battlefield, but it would not last long.

“Thanks, Da.”

Owaine nodded without answer. He held no weapon other than Blaze. “Give me your sword,” he said. When Kayne hesitated, he barked angrily, “
Now!
” Kayne handed him the sword, and Owaine remounted his horse. “Here,” he said, taking Blaze and its chain from around his neck. “You take this.” He tossed the Cloch Mór down to Kayne; as it left his hand, an expression of horrible pain came over Owaine’s face and he swayed, nearly falling from the back of his horse.

“Da?” Kayne looked at the stone. He could
feel
the Cloch Mór in his mind: a compelling presence, an aching emptiness that yearned to be filled again with the mage-lights.

Owaine straightened with a visible effort. The setting sun had vanished behind the rank of spreading clouds, but even in the twilight, his face was pale. He seemed to be barely able to hold the sword. “Take any wounded who can walk and leave here,” he said. He was staring at Blaze rather than Kayne as he nodded to the cleft and its inviting screen of brush and trees. “The rest of us will give you time, and darkness will give you cover.” Owaine’s face was a rictus of pain and fury, of loss and betrayal. He looked already dead. “For once, Kayne, obey me without question. For once, be a soldier.
Go
!”

Owaine didn’t wait for an answer. He gave another longing glance to Blaze in Kayne’s hand, then yanked hard at the reins and dug his boot heels into the horse’s side. As he rode away, he screamed: the eerie, frightening warble of the
caointeoireacht na cogadh,
the war cry of the Inishlanders. Seeing their commander, those of the troop still able to ride or run joined him in the charge, rushing directly into the oncoming line of the Airgiallaian foot soldiers. Clutching the emptied Blaze, Kayne almost turned to join them, but his leg collapsed underneath him and he nearly fell.

He saw the two lines meet. He saw Owaine disappear into the mass of shouting troops. He saw blue mage-fury erupt where Owaine had been.

He couldn’t get there. Couldn’t get to them. Couldn’t help his da.

A hero doesn’t get to choose his time or even to know whether he was successful.
Kayne knew what Owaine meant by that, now.

And if he did not, his da’s sacrifice would be for nothing.

Groaning, Kayne pushed himself up. He patted Gainmheach, whose eyes rolled white with pain at him as it thrashed on its side. “I’m sorry, old friend,” he whispered to the horse, then reached for his boot dagger, slashing deep into the horse’s neck. Blood gushed and pulsed as Gainmheach lurched up, nearly knocking Kayne to the ground again before falling back quiet, its lifeblood staining its coat and dripping onto the ground.

Kayne put his back to the sounds of battle. He heard someone call his name from beside the wreckage of one of the wagons: Bartel, one of those who had been in the wagons with one leg gone at the knee from an Arruk jaka. Bartel clutched a sword whose edge ran with blood, and a garda in red-and-white colors lay on the ground before him.

“Come with me,” Kayne told Bartel, putting the man’s arm around his shoulder. “We have to leave. Quickly!”

Kayne glanced back one last time. He couldn’t see his da, could see nothing but a roil of bodies further up the pass, murky in the growing darkness. He placed Blaze’s chain around his neck and took Bartel’s weight on his good leg.

They limped toward the cleft and cover. Behind them, the sound of steel against steel battered the gray clouds lowering over the pass and shook rain from them. Kayne was glad for the drops, which mingled with the salt from his eyes.

“NO! NO-NO-NO!”

Dillon scrambled away from Sevei, his hands leaving her. “I’m sorry,” he said automatically. Sevei didn’t answer. She stared outward without seeing Dillon’s face in the careening light of the lantern hung on one of the beams. What she saw was inside, and it had torn her away from Dillon’s embrace.

The two simultaneous images warred with each other in her mind: her mam, falling lifeless from her chair; Kayne surrounded by fighting men, with the fury of Clochs Mór crackling around him. Pain and loss and grief welled outward from the vision, and she cried aloud again with the grief and loss, sobbing.

“Sevei?” Dillon’s hands touched her cheeks. She looked up at him, her voice trembling with the tears. “Sevei, what’s the matter?”

“Mam . . . Mam’s dead and Kayne’s badly hurt,” she told him. Her voice sounded like someone else’s, high and fast. “By the Mother ... I felt Mam die, felt her breath leave her. And Kayne—I can feel everything.” Her breath was so fast, her heart hammering inside her chest so that she could barely talk. She was clutching her leg as if it pained her. “They’re killing my family, Dillon. They’re killing them all!” She sobbed, screaming the words. “Gram! I have to see Gram!”

“That can’t be,” Dillon said. “Sevei, you’re just worried, what with the storm and being away so long. I’ll bet they’re both fine . . .”

“No!” she shouted at him, pushing him away. She was sobbing, unable to stop the welling of grief. “It’s true. I
know
it.” She sat up, pulling her léine down and wrapping her clóca around her. She could hear voices on deck, among them her gram and Máister Kirwan. “I have to go to Gram,” she said again. She wanted to sob against Gram’s shoulder, wanted her strength and her familiar presence, wanted her to use Lámh Shábhála and take it all away.

Sevei hurried from the tiny cabin, Dillon following in her wake. Her breath was caught low in her throat and the terror inside her threatened to rip through her body and leave her broken and wailing. Outside, the cold wind whipped her hair around her neck; a few spatters of returning rain were already touching the deck. The circle of clear sky around them was nearly gone, the blue sky hazed with high, thin clouds and the storm clouds dark all around them. Gram and Máister Kirwan were huddled with the captain near the bow. They were passing the jutting headland of the nearest island and gliding into the more sheltered bay beyond. Waiting for them there were three other ships; though they were obviously warships from the navy of one of the Tuatha, none of them flew a banner of allegiance. Sevei could already see that they had flanked
Uaigneas,
using oars and sails.

The dread that had struck Sevei in the cabin now filled her entirely. She knew, knew without Gram or Máister Kirwan saying anything, that the ships were not there to aid them, that they had come deliberately expecting them to pass near here. Her vision and this reality before her were connected, she was certain.

“Gram?” she said, but Jenna didn’t turn. Máister Kirwan glanced over his shoulder at Sevei and Dillon, then turned back.