Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (27 page)

Her head tilted again. Her mouth opened slightly, as if she wanted to speak, then closed again. She stared at him and there was such desperation in her face that Kayne spread his hands. “Can you write, Séarlait?”

She shook her head.

“Teach me what you know about that long bow of yours, and I’ll teach you to write. Then you could ‘talk’ to those who can read.”

“Oh, she can talk, Tiarna. At least to me.” Laird O’Blath mhaic grunted as he climbed up onto the tumbled wall near them, though despite his age he climbed the broken rocks easier than Kayne had with his wounded thigh and bruises. His gray, braided beard swayed as he came over to them. “I can understand her with what she says with her hands and her face and her body. If you listen that way hard enough, you can understand. You can teach her to write if she wants, but there’s few in the Fingerlands who could read it. Reading’s for the Riocha, not the likes of us.” O’Blathmhaic put his arm around his great-daughter, who hugged him in return, smiling. “She talked to me while you were off meeting with that grim captain of the gardai, she did.”

With that, Séarlait scowled up at O’Blathmhaic and pushed his arm from around her. Her cheeks reddened, and the glare in her eyes was unmistakable.

O’Blathmhaic ignored her. “She said she thought you were like clansfolk, that you could understand us. That we should help you if we could. She told me that while I was talking with the Banlaird in Ceangail and Laird Woulfe of the Wall. She said that the Healer Ard hadn’t been like the other Riocha, and that you were her true son and like her. She said you wouldn’t betray us.” Laird O’Blathmhaic stared hard at Kayne, his eyes unblinking and hard. Deep sunset gold played over his face, though the stones at his feet were in shadow. “Did I hear her right? Is that true, Tiarna? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that you wouldn’t betray the clansfolk once you’re back in your splendid keeps and bright cities?”

“I keep my word, Clan-Laird,” Kayne told him. “I said that if it were in my power, the Finger would be its own Tuath and belong to the clans and not Rí Airgialla. And I tell you this, too—if it were in my power, the Tuatha would come to defend the Fingerlanders with our Clochs Mór and our gardai, because that time is coming, too.” Kayne pointed east toward Céile Mhór. “The creatures that attacked Ceangail will come here in all their numbers one day, perhaps sooner than we’d like to pretend. It’s here, on the eastern side of the Bunús Wall, that we can best defend ourselves.”

“And you’ll accomplish all this with the few double-hands of men you have?”

Kayne laughed at that, bitterly. “If that’s all I have, then that’s what I’ll have to use.”

Laird O’Blathmhaic laughed then, a loud, hearty amusement that echoed from the nearest slopes. “Aye, spoken like a true clansman.” He clapped Kayne on the back, the blow nearly making Kayne stagger on his bad leg. Then O’Blathmhaic leaned close, his forehead nearly touching Kayne’s and his breath was warm on Kayne’s face as he whispered. The man had been drinking. Kayne could smell the alcohol.

“Listen to me, boy. I’ve watched the way you look at Séarlait. More than that, I’ve seen the way she looks at you. The girl’s old enough to make her own decisions, and the Greatness knows that I’m glad to see her finally looking at a man with something other than suspicion. But I won’t see Séarlait hurt, do you hear? So you be careful that you keep any promises you make her, with your words
or
with your body. Are we understanding each other now?”

The man’s gaze, close and hard, burrowed into Kayne. Kayne forced himself to stare back, nodding once. “Aye, I understand,” he said, “and if I were her great-da, I would be saying the same thing.”

O’Blathmhaic grinned then, showing the few teeth left in his gums. His thick hand came up and slapped Kayne gently on the cheek. “I think it’s time we call all the clan-lairds to Ceangail,” he said, stepping back. “There’s things they should know, and things we might do.” The shadows had climbed to his waist, and he clambered down from the wall like a man half his age, into growing darkness. He was singing as he went away, a loud, off-key baritone.

“Scilidh leann fírinne,” Kayne said to Séarlait:
Beer divulges truth.
She gave him a smile at that. She took the bow from her back; stepping across the stave, she strung it—as easily as any gardai—and handed it to Kayne. His hand touched hers, and the touch seemed to last for longer than necessary before she gave him the bow. She nodded to him, tapping herself and then mimicking drawing a bowstring.

Kayne frowned for a moment, not understanding, then realized. “You’ll teach me? Is that what you said?” She nodded, then made a gesture as if she were writing in the air.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll teach each other.”

“If I closed my eyes, I could be back in Dún Laoghaire, listening to the Riocha argue.”

Harik and Séarlait, sitting on either side of Kayne, both responded with fleeting, tight-lipped grins. They were close to the door, at one of the several long tables placed in Ceangail’s town hall. The hall was blue with smoke from pipeweed, hot with tight-packed bodies and a roaring wood fire in the massive hearth, and loud with contentious voices from the various lairds and banlairds and clansfolk. Kayne had been introduced to each of them, though he’d already forgotten half the names. The clansfolk, unlike the Riocha, seemed to have no rules of order to the meeting, and most already knew what was to be discussed when they arrived and walked in ready to shout their opinion to the others. Volume seemed to be the key to being heard, and even when the clansfolk paused in their several conversations to listen to one speaker, they constantly interrupted the person with comments, questions, and sometimes bald insults. There had already been two fights, quickly broken up, but with the amount of ale and stout being consumed, Kayne expected more would follow.

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 . . .”