Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (25 page)

Isibéal didn’t answer and Ennis squirmed around on the horse’s back to face Isibéal. “The Clannhra was going to spit again,” he said to her. “I
know
. She doesn’t think she has a choice.” He shook his head, looking up at her. “You should have done what you were told to do. Too many people hate you now.” He smiled at her: gently, innocently, like the child he was.
Patterns . . .

“I hate you, too,” he said. “Because of what you did.” He felt Isibéal shift, felt her slip her hand into her pocket to touch the Heart. He knew that she opened the cloch, that she was taking the power from it and holding it, and that she would use it but not as Mam had.

Before Isibéal could release the mage-energy, Ennis moved. His small hand had slipped her boot knife from its sheath and brought the blade up to the side of her neck. The gleaming edge slipped easily into her skin before she could react, and he pulled back hard.

“This is because of my mam,” he said as blood fountained, as Isibéal clapped a late and useless hand to the gaping wound, as she stared at him openmouthed. Isibéal tried to speak, but only a gurgle of frothing blood came out. Wild mage-light surged around her, as if she could no longer hold it. She took her hand from the pocket of her clóca, bringing out the Heart and clutching her hand tight around it. In the sea-colored image in his mind, Ennis saw her using the cloch as his mam had, the terrible wound he’d just given her closing impossibly, the power of Treoraí’s Heart healing her. He grabbed at the stone himself with his free hand, tearing past her straining fingers. He felt the connection to the stone instantly, as if he struck his elbow on the edge of a table, but the prickling and tingling was a thousand times worse.

He gasped. There were voices in his head . . .

The last voice, the strongest one because it was full of the mage-energy uncontrolled from the Heart, was that of Isibéal, but he didn’t listen to her. The pattern he followed wouldn’t let him, for in the shape of the future where Isibéal snatched the Heart back from him, he saw himself dead: out where the blue ghosts were still bright enough to be understood, no more than a few days distant. The horror of that vision gave him strength and he scrabbled for the Heart as the blood poured from her mutilated neck, as—connected to her through the Heart, the power of the mage-lights surging through both of them, the cloch caught between both of their minds—he felt her die.

Isibéal’s mouth worked as if she wanted to speak, but she toppled to one side, her hand opening so that he was holding the Heart alone as her body fell with a thud to the soft earth, leaving a thick trail of blood splattered over the horse’s back. Her body twitched once and lay still, a slow and thick pool of red staining the grass at her shoulder.

His clóca spattered with her gore, Ennis shifted again on the horse’s back. He dropped the knife he still held. It landed softly near Isibéal’s legs as he put the necklace holding Treoraí’s Heart around his neck.

He heard the chuckle of Isibéal’s voice. “
I’m still here, Ennis. Still here. I’ll always be here for you . . .”

The blue ghosts of patterns fell away then, leaving him alone and lost, and he finally began to cry like the child he was.

“DID YOU FIND IT?” Jenna’s voice was barely audible and the hope in Gram’s eyes pained Sevei more than any of the wounds and bruises on her body. Gram’s head lifted, the matted gray hair standing out stiffly as she stirred under the blanket of kelp. Then Sevei saw the hope die in her face as Sevei wondered what to say. Jenna’s lips pressed together and the head dropped back down.

From a large rock at the edge of the lapping surf, Bhralhg and two of the Saimhóir cows watched.

“I’m sorry, Gram,” Sevei said. She was shivering from more than the cold. “I looked, but . . .” The horror of the wreck came rushing back to her in the form of the bloated, dead-white face of Dillon. She shut her eyes, but it was still there. The tears came then—tears she could shed in human form but not as Saimhóir. She cried for grief and fright and the unknown. “I . . .” She had to stop, had to gasp for breath, had to force the heavy grief in her throat back down. “I couldn’t find it, Gram. I’ll try again, tomorrow.”

She wondered whether that were true, whether she could dare to descend to the wreck once more. Even though her body ached and she longed to simply fall to the rocks and sleep despite the cold, she was afraid to close her eyes, afraid of what might haunt her dreams.

“. . . I’m so cold . . .”

The whisper was so low that Sevei barely heard it. She went to Jenna, stroking her hair back. Her forehead burned to the touch. “You have a fever, Gram,” Sevei said. “We have to get you somewhere . . . If I could build a fire . . .” Sevei was still shivering herself, naked in the biting wind, hungry and worn out. The clochmion swung in her vision as she leaned over her gram again, and she touched it, feeling the cold power within it: mockingly useless. “What good is this when we need food and shelter?” she railed to the sky and the watching Saimhóir. She clutched the stone, taking the chain from around her neck. She drew her arm back, intending to throw the clochmion into the sea, but her hand would not open. Angrily, she placed it around her neck again. “Gram, I have to find us help. We’re in the Stepping Stones, and some of them are sympathetic to Inish Thuaidh, so—”

“
No!
” The answer was strong and Jenna’s eyes opened once more. “Just find Lámh Shábhála. Then it will all be fine.” Her eyes closed again and the voice dropped to a whisper between cracked and broken lips. “Everything fine. Find . . . The voice trailed off.

Jenna’s body convulsed under the blanketing kelp. Once. Then again. Then a quick series of contortions as Sevei—helpless—crouched alongside her great-mam, holding her as if by sheer force of will she could stop the jerking spasms. Jenna grunted as if someone were punching her and she spat clotted blood: brown-red globs that smeared her face and Sevei’s body. “Gram!” Sevei screamed, clutching Jenna to herself. “Please . . .”

Jenna went still. “Gram?” She didn’t dare look down. She relaxed her hold. Jenna’s head lolled back: the mouth and eyes open, the body limp.
“Gram!”

From his rock, Bhralhg gave a low, mournful cry, joined by the other Saimhóir with him. A few breaths later, Sevei heard the call taken up by the rest of the Saimhóir pod around the small headland.

“Gram, I’m so sorry I failed you,” Sevei husked. “I’m sorry.” She stroked Jenna’s head, wanting to shake her but without the strength to do more than sit there and moan.

As the Saimhóir wailed, she cried.

“Sevei, you must come with me.”

The voice sounded in her head, accompanied by the warbling coughs of the Saimhóir tongue. Bhralhg had come up alongside her. Sevei could see his flipper covering her foot, but she could not feel it. She could barely feel anything. “You’ll die here if you don’t make the change to Saimhóir form.”

“She’s cold. So cold,” Sevei told him. Sevei had no idea how much time had passed. She blinked; the sun had fallen behind clouds and she was still holding Gram, the body stiffening and as cold as the ground on which she sat. She couldn’t feel her hands or her feet. She must have fallen asleep, and her eyes wanted to close again. She was too tired to even shiver. “Cold,” she said again.

“I know,” Bhralhg said. “Put her down and come with me, Sevei.”

“No,” Sevei said, as calmly as if she were back in the White Keep. For a moment she thought she heard Máister Kirwan’s voice. “
Sevei, what are you doing
?”

“Sitting here, Máister,” she answered. She thought that she should somehow be embarrassed, talking with Máister Kirwan in her nudity, but it seemed oddly normal. “Gram’s dead. I have to build a pyre to send her to the Mother, but I don’t have wood or oil or a fire. I don’t know what to do.”

“Then you must come with me,” Máister Kirwan said. He held out his hand. “Put Jenna down,” he told Sevei, looking sadly and lovingly at Gram. “You can’t help her now. None of us can. You must help yourself; that’s what she’d want.”

“She wanted me to find Lámh Shábhála, and it’s lost and I couldn’t find it,” Sevei told him. “If I had, I could have saved her. That’s what killed her, Máister; losing the cloch was too hard for her.”

“I know,” Máister Kirwan answered. “Lámh Shábhála will return when it’s time. When there’s someone it wants to take up the cloch again. Come with me,” he repeated, bending down to her. Reluctantly, she obeyed, laying Gram back down on the bed of kelp and taking his hand. He led her toward the shore.

“Is there a boat?” she asked, but the water was lapping around her ankles and a wave crashed in cold and high, and it seemed that Máister Kirwan was swimming with her, taking her down and her body was changing and the water was warm now. A Saimhóir, dark and massive, swam in front of her and released a dead fish from his mouth, and it seemed to Sevei a feast. The realization of a deep hunger gnawed in her belly and she extended her head forward on her sleek neck and took the fish in her mouth, tasting its sweetness as she tore at it, gulping down the white, ragged flesh . . .

“Aye, that’s it . . .” Máister Kirwan’s voice came but it wasn’t his any longer but Bhralhg’s and she realized that she was swimming with the Saimhóir as one of them. “There’s more of the sweetfish—follow me . . .” and he was darting away through the surging, powerful surf. Sevei hesitated, bobbing her head above the surface to look back at the little inlet where Gram lay.

“I’ll be back,” she called to her, though her words emerged slurred and unrecognizable from her seal’s throat. “I promise you, Gram. I’ll come back for you.” She gulped air and dove, pursuing Bhralhg and the others.

She swam with them for a day, longer than she’d ever consciously stayed in that form before, eating and emerging from the water to rest on the land, all of them packed together and sharing their warmth during the night. When the sun rose again, she lifted her snout. A smell tickled the air, a smell she remembered: burning peat, carried on the breeze from the northwest and close. Bhralhg was beside her, his own head raised and his body touching her so that she could hear his words.

“Going to your people now is dangerous. You don’t know who they are or what they might be after.”

She gave a cough that might have been a bitter laugh. “I can’t stay here,” she told him. “I’m not Saimhóir.”

He snorted. “No, you’re not.”

“I need to go back, Bhralhg. No matter what it means. Staying here . . . All I’m doing is running away, and all I accomplish is to give those who did this what they want. They wanted me dead; by now, they must believe that I am.”

“So you want your revenge?”

She thought about that. “I don’t know,” she answered, but she did know. She felt it even as she denied it. Bhralhg stared at her. “Aye, I do,” she said finally, “but . . . I don’t know how I can do that yet. I just know that whatever it is I should do, it’s not here.”

He pointed with his head to the water. “Lámh Shábhála is here. If you stay, it may become yours.”

“My mam could have held Lámh Shábhála,” she said. “She refused to take it. Maybe she knew better than all of those who want it. Maybe even better than Gram. Máister Kirwan said that Gram wanted me to have it, but maybe Lámh Shábhála never wanted me.” If she’d been in human form, she would have shrugged. “It’s something I’ll never know. All I know is that I can’t stay here. I just . . . can’t.”

“Sevei, I don’t know you well enough . . .” Bhralhg was saying, but she’d already slipped away from him and his voice became that of a seal as she slid from rock to water. She swam away hard, wondering if he would follow. She heard him enter the sea, but he stayed behind her, shadowing her as she swam around the curve of the tiny island, stopping a few times to lift her head above the waves and sniff the air. Around a rocky tongue, she saw the small currach pulled up between two rocks and the curl of black smoke higher up on the land.

She dropped back into the sea, wanting to at least say good-bye to Bhralhg, to thank him for all he’d done.

But he was gone.