Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (23 page)

Bunús Wall. Five miles long, the ruins of the wall undulated over the ridges and valleys of the Finger from the cliffs of the Ice Sea to the shore of the Tween. Most of the tall barrier of stone had tumbled down long ago, but some parts remained much as they had been: as thick as the outstretched hands of two men and as tall as three, the massive granite blocks carved from some quarry as yet unfound. The wall had been there, in nearly the same condition, since the Daoine had come to Talamh an Ghlas, almost 1200 years before. The legend was that the Bunús Muintir had built the wall as a buffer against some long-forgotten invaders, but even the Bunús Muintir who lived in Talamh an Ghlas didn’t know if that was true or simply myth. Some said it had been raised by Bunús Muintir cloudmages, that even huge crews of slaves laboring away for centuries couldn’t possibly have built it, that the Bunús lacked the technology to transport the immense carved blocks of stone so far from their source. Whatever the truth might be, the Bunús Wall was still magnificent even in half ruin. There were faces in the wall, leering gargoyles and fierce coiled dragons, snapping wolves and glaring demons—all of them carved in the stone, all of them glaring outward to the east and Céile Mhór. The faces were eroded now by time and weather, though once they must have presented a formidable scene, freshly carved and painted and snarling at any advancing force. Bunús Gate itself, where the High Road passed through it, was made in the form of a strange winged feline with scaled skin, its yawning mouth the opening through which the road passed, its clawed front feet the supports.

“Whoever it was the Old Ones fought, they defeated them, for the Bunús were still here when we came, eh?” Laird O’Blathmhaic patted a dragon’s snout on a fallen stone. The dragon now stared defiantly at the sky and its mouth was stuffed with an old bird’s nest. “I wonder if they didn’t use their slow magic or their clochs na thintrí to make the dragons roar and the wolves howl, all the carvings writhing like they were alive. Now that would be a sight to make you piss in your boots, wouldn’t it? We should be glad our ancestors didn’t come then, or they might have gone running back to wherever they came from, eh?”

Kayne remembered how he’d shivered the first time he passed the Bunús Wall, riding through the magnificent remnants of Bunús Gate. He could well imagine how his long-dead ancestors must have felt seeing this for the first time. “The clansfolk all have Bunús blood in ’em. Most of us, anyway. That’s where we get—” The old man stopped as Séarlait waved at him from farther down the wall. “She’s found your people,” he said. “Let’s go meet them.”

The men in the encampment Harik had established near Bunús Gate stared uneasily at the clansfolk even as they gathered around Garvan, Sean, and Bartel with cries of mingled greeting and alarm. Kayne led Harik away from the group toward the High Gate as Garvan began to relate their own tales of the ambush at the Narrows. Kayne found that it was difficult to even talk about that day, that when he spoke of his da the tears burned in his eyes, heated by the inferno of rage in his heart. Harik flushed, his hands making impotent fists as Kayne related the tale. He slammed one of those mailed fists against a gargoyle’s skull, breaking off an ear flap as Kayne spoke of Owaine’s last, futile charge into the Airgiallaian ranks.

“That is what I’d expect of Tiarna Owaine. He was always a man who thought of those around him first,” Harik said, his voice oddly quiet. He took a long breath, his exhalation a cloud in the cold air of the mountain ridge. “I’ll miss your da, Tiarna, and I will grieve a long time for him. So will the rest of the men. Unfortunately, I think Laird O’Blathmhaic’s right: if Rí Mac Baoill would send his gardai and his own son here to attack us, then I’m afraid the situation can’t be good in Dún Laoghaire. The Ríthe couldn’t move against us unless they also moved against the Banrion Ard herself, and probably the Mad—” Harik stopped. “I mean the Banrion Inish Thuaidh.” He shook his head. “And we have a bare hand of double-hands of men here. That’s all.” He lifted his chin. “What now, Tiarna? You’re now the commander in your da’s place. You have my loyalty, as he did.”

Kayne scoffed. “Do I deserve the gift of your loyalty, Harik?”

Harik started to answer, then stopped. He regarded Kayne for several breaths. “You’re Riocha,” he said. “You’re the son of Owaine Geraghty, who was husband to the Banrion Ard. For all we know out here in this Mother-forsaken place, you may be the only one of the Ger aghtys—” Again he snapped his mouth shut. Kayne felt the sense of loss and grief pounding at his chest.
The world has changed underneath me. The ground is no longer safe.

“Riocha, Banrion Ard, Tiarna: those are just words and titles, Harik. Is that why you gave your loyalty to Da, for his title? Is that why you would take the chance and scold me like a misbehaving child not four days ago in Ceangail? Is that why Da loved you so much? Because of the titles he held?”

“You have my loyalty,” Harik answered simply.

“Because of
me,
Harik,” Kayne persisted, “or because of Da?”

Harik’s gaze was fixed somewhere just above Kayne’s eyes. “Because of your da.”

Kayne snorted. He turned, looking back over the encampment of Harik’s men, knowing that if—if—they would follow Kayne, it would be because Harik MacCathaill the Hand ordered them to do so. Ahead of Kayne were the humped, blue spines of the Fingerlands, and beyond . . . Was there open war in the Tuatha, or had it all been settled already, with perhaps a new Ard sitting on the throne his mam had once occupied? Was the smoke from the pyres of his mam and his siblings already rising out there? For Sevei? For his gram?

Harik must have guessed at his thoughts. “We could go back to Concordia, Tiarna Geraghty,” the man said. “The new Thane would give us refuge in Céile Mhór for the help we gave his father against the Arruk, no matter what has happened in Talamh an Ghlas. A life spent fighting the Arruk wouldn’t be a wasted one.”

The clouds, scudding over the sky, cast mesmerizing sun-shadows over the peaks. Kayne could glimpse the Tween Sea from here, where the Bunús Wall vanished to the south: a fragment of calm in a landscape where everything else was jumbled and broken.

“Tiarna?”

Kayne shivered.

“You and your men can make your own choices, Harik,” Kayne said without turning. “Go back to Concordia if you want, or continue forward to Talamh An Ghlas if you think that you’ll be safe—Rí Mac Baoill wants
me,
not you or the gardai. I won’t ask anyone to risk themselves for me.”

Behind him, Harik grunted. “And you, Tiarna?”

Kayne felt a leaden certainty settle around his shoulders. Blaze seemed to tug heavier on its chain. “I have questions I need to ask of the Ríthe who did this to my family,” he said, “and I also have hard answers I intend to give them.”

Kayne heard Harik turn to go back to the camp. The wall was a thick, cold presence on his left, but he hadn’t followed it for more than a few strides when he saw Séarlait leaning there half-hidden in shadows. She was watching him. “You heard?” he asked.

A nod.

“It was none of your business,” he told her, but he could not make the words sound as sharp as they should have been. Séarlait gave a shrug and continued to gaze at him, as if she were trying to judge him. He wondered what she saw, what she thought. He stared back at her, trying to imagine her as she could have been: a comely young woman, with a low, honeyed voice and a laugh that sparked with joy and delight . . .

She nodded again, as if he’d spoken. Leaning down quickly, she plucked two leaves of grass from the ground. She came closer to him, an arm’s length away, and held one of the blades to her breast, placing the other against Kayne’s chest. Her gaze never allowed his eyes to leave hers. Her lips relaxed into a brief, fleeting smile. She brought the two leaves together between them, tapping her hands together. She gestured at the grass below their feet, then pointed at him, then her. It came to him suddenly, what she was trying to say.

“We’re alike, like two blades of grass? Is that what you mean?”

Séarlait nodded once, emphatically. The smile returned, vanished like the sun behind fast-moving clouds. She let the twinned leaves fall to the ground. She hesitated, as if she wanted him to say more, but he could only look at her: her face, the terrible scar across her neck showing above the top of her léine. She started to turn away, but he reached out and touched her arm. He felt her tense and he thought that she would slap his hand away. He looked down at his fingers instead, and he let his hand fall back to his side. She brushed hair back from her face and rubbed her hand on her arm where he’d touched her.

“You may be right,” he told her. “More than we both realize.”

ENNIS SAID VERY LITTLE after he awoke.

Isibéal thought initially that it was because the boy was understandably shocked by what had happened—she hadn’t yet told him that his mam was dead, but with their frantic ride through the night away from Dún Laoghaire, even at his age he must have known that he’d been kidnapped and spirited away. She’d expected tears or tantrums or sobbing panic when the boy woke up from his induced sleep. She’d expected disorientation and screaming accusations. She expected him to demand to be returned to Dún Laoghaire and his mam.

But Ennis did none of those. He woke during one of her brief pauses to rest and determine where she was. He blinked and looked around him with bright curiosity. “When will we be there, Isibéal?” he asked, as if they were out on some scheduled jaunt to one of his cousins’ holdings. There was no accusation on his face, nor any fright; he seemed older than his few years. He stared at her with an intent curiosity, as he might some juggler’s entertainment and a songmaster’s concert. His sober gaze unnerved Isibéal.

“I don’t know yet,” she told him, and he nodded, accepting the answer and saying nothing more. That night, Isibéal lifted the Heart to the mage-lights, and felt for the first time the exhilarating and intoxicating pleasure of filling the cloch. She also knew then that she could not ever willingly give up Treoraí’s Heart. It would be hers until she died—and she was afraid that would be far too soon. She pushed the horse hard through the rest of the night, forcing herself to stay awake and touching the Heart over and over again.

As the sun started to rise the next day, she kicked the exhausted horse onto the willow-draped hummock. They were in a bog pooled in the hills south of Dún Laoghaire, not far enough away yet for Isibéal’s comfort. Ennis sat quietly, watching as she struggled with the packs, as weary and battered as their mount. “Get over here and help me,” she snapped at the boy.

He continued to stare, his eyes widening just a bit. “I mean it, Ennis. Out here, there’s no one to hear you, and I don’t have to answer to your mam. If I need to beat you, I will.”

“No, you won’t.” He said it calmly, with a soft certainty. Annoyed and angry at his refusal, she lifted her hand, and finally shook her head.

She was too tired to argue. The ride during darkness had been tense and frightening. More than once she’d thought she’d heard pursuit behind them and she’d glanced back, terrified, knowing that it was not only the gardai who would be looking for her, but also those who had hired her.

She knew the choice she’d made meant her death if she were captured now—by gardai or by those who had hired her. Those loyal to the Banrion Ard would want their vengeance; the Order of Gabair and the Ríthe would want the same. There was no place for her here. No place she could vanish, not even among the Taisteal. Her only hope was to leave Talamh an Ghlas entirely.