Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (20 page)

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 . . .”

“No.” Jenna raised her hand: the one swirled with the scarred patterns of the mage-lights. The marks were an angry red now, as if infected, and the burns had ravaged the arm above the elbow. “What I need most is nothing any healer can give me.”

“Lámh Shábhála,” Sevei said well before Jenna’s faint nod.

“I knew I might be killing myself when I threw it in the sea. But I was willing to accept that rather than let Doyle have it.” She laughed again. “My poor half brother. He’ll never hold it. Never.” Jenna’s hand reached up and found Sevei’s face, stroking it gently. “You could find it,” she said. “Not in this form, but the other.” Her hand, so stiff that it was more claw than hand, tangled in Sevei’s hair, pulling it sharply. “Find it, Sevei. Find it and it might be yours one day, when I’m gone.” Jenna’s voice was a desperate hiss, her eyes wild.

“Gram, you’re hurting me—”

“
Find
it, Sevei,” Jenna spat. “Do you hear me, child?” Then, with a groan, she fell back, her eyes closing and her body hunching into a fetal ball. “Mother, you can’t imagine how this hurts. I can’t bear this. I can’t.”

“Maybe the Saimhóir have something that can help, some medicine.”

“The Saimhóir?” Jenna snorted bitterly. “They love to see me like this. It gives them pleasure. They think that this is my proper punishment for Thraisha and Dhegli. They dragged me here so they could watch me suffer and die.”

Sevei glanced again at Bhralhg, whose whiskers twitched as he grunted something in his own language that she could not understand. “You’re wrong, Gram.”

Jenna snorted again. “Are you going to talk to me to death, child? Is that what you want?” For a few breaths, the pain washed over her, her face a mask of lines and her eyes closed tightly shut as she huddled under the kelp. Then her eyes opened again as she panted. “You can stay and here and watch me die with the damned seals, or you can help me. You need to choose, Sevei.”

Sevei started to answer, but a spray of rocks cascaded down from the steep hillside above them, bouncing over the rocks and into the water. Bhralhg was still moaning, his snout lifted upward toward the land, and Sevei followed his gaze.

Three men stood above them, not fifty strides away, looking down at the little cove where they were huddled: a blue seal, a naked young woman, and the injured Banrion Holder. Two of the men were dressed as gardai; the other was a young tiarna with bright red hair, clad in the green clóca of the Order of Gabair. A stone dangled from a chain around his neck—certainly a Cloch Mór or a clochmion. She recognized him immediately: Padraic Mac Ard.

He was looking directly down to where Sevei stood. He could not have missed her, staring up at him with her mouth half-open in surprise and fear. She was frozen in place, not certain what to do—she could dive back into the water, become a seal and perhaps escape Padraic, but her gram couldn’t do that. She reached for the clochmion, closing her hand around its comforting facets, but there was no answering dragon call. Yet . . . Holding Dragoncaller, she could feel another power active close by, one that tasted of salt and water . . .

Through the noise of the surf, she could hear one of the gardai with Padraic talking. “. . . all day walking around this Mother-cursed island and we’re seeing nothing but rocks, grass, birds, and sheep. Not to complain, but this cold and damp is hard on my bones.”

“You’re just getting old, soft, and tired,” the other garda said. “Why, I don’t think—”

“Shut up, both of you,” Padraic said. “Neither one of you is out here to think.” The younger garda snapped his mouth shut. She could see the older one roll his eyes at his companion behind Padraic’s back. “We’re here to look for the Mad Holder and Bantiarna Geraghty, either them or Saimhóir, and unless you idiots want to be the next ones that dangerous old bitch kills, I’d suggest you use your eyes more than your mouths.”

All the time he was talking, Padraic’s gaze was sweeping back and forth over the beach below. Sevei saw his regard pass directly over her twice and yet he said nothing, gave no indication that he saw her at all. She could hear Bhralhg moaning softly behind her, large and conspicuous on the rocks, and it was impossible that they did not see or hear him.

Yet they did not. “Nothing there,” Padraic said after a few moments. “All right—we’ll finish up this island, then move on to the next one. We can eat when we get back to the ship. Come on . . .”

Sevei watched them walk away, vanishing quickly over the brim of the hillside. The low keening from Bhralhg stopped. “You did that,” she said to him. He could not have understood her words, but the amazement on her face communicated enough. He gave the toss of the head that she knew was a Saimhóir nod. Jenna seemed to have lapsed into unconsciousness or uneasy sleep. Sevei shivered, the wind and spray whipping around her. With the touch of the water, she let herself slip back into Saimhóir form and waddled over to Bhralhg. “Thank you,” she told him when their bodies touched.

His voice came to her head, amused. “I know what the Holder thinks of me. Do you think the same?”

“No.” She watched Jenna, shivering in her sleep and whimpering like a child. “Can you help her, with the power that you have?”

Bhralhg gave a shake of his broad head. “I’ve done what I can. I can’t give her what she is missing.”

Sevei sighed. “I need to go to where the ships—the wooden islands that move—were when you found us. Can you take me there?”

His large eyes regarded her thoughtfully. “I can,” he said.

The part of her that was Saimhóir was comfortable out here, but the human part felt lost and frail. The sea was huge, featureless and eternally shifting, and the spot to which Bhralhg guided her could have been anywhere. Even the islands that she glimpsed as they bobbed up and down in the long, low swells were no help; she hadn’t been able to see them very well in the storm that night. Her body, even in seal form, ached where the wounds were still healing, and she wondered whether she would have the strength to search and still make it back to shore. She let the next wave take her sideways until her body brushed Bhralhg’s fur. “You’re certain?” she thought to him, and she heard laughter in her head overlaid with the bark of a seal.

“This is where we found you,” he answered with a firm confidence. “And I know what you’re looking for. You won’t find it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked him suspiciously.

Bhralhg swam away for a moment, then returned. His voice came to her as they touched. “I know how it is with Bradán an Chumhacht,” he said. “You don’t always choose the power. Often—most often—it chooses you. When Challa died and gave up Bradán an Chumhacht, there were others who were closer to it as it came from her mouth. They chased the Great Salmon, many of Challa’s milk-sons and -daughters, all of them ready to swallow and take it in. But Bradán an Chumhacht swam to me and away from them, and all I had to do was open my mouth. It wanted me, for reasons I don’t know. I think it may be the same for you stone-walkers and Lámh Shábhála. The cloch will find whom it wants, now that it is free.”

“It’s
not
free,” Sevei insisted. “Gram is still alive and it belongs to her. She needs it.”

“She needs
it,
” Bhralhg agreed. “But does Lámh Shábhála still need her?”

Sevei felt herself shiver at that. She rolled away from him so she couldn’t hear his voice anymore. He grunted something at her in the Saimhóir tongue; she took a long breath and dove.