Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (54 page)

And there . . . there was Treoraí’s Heart, with its hidden Holder . . . and there . . .

. . . there was the Presence: the Bán Cailleach. Sevei. Her horribly scarred face peered down at him with gentle sympathy in the unbroken blackness of her eyes. “Oh, Kayne. I didn’t realize it was so bad . . .”

“Aye, it’s that bad,” he said. He wanted to laugh and dared not, knowing how it would hurt. “I’m dying, Sevei.”

“You can’t die,” she said. “I need you too much.” He wanted to believe her. The power of the mage-lights sang in her voice, an undertone like the roar of a wild sea, crashing and thundering. Her skin was so bright that it hurt his eyes to look at her. He closed them against the pain.

“Kayne, look at me,” she said. “Stay with me,” and it sounded as if her voice spoke in his ear. He opened his eyes, slowly, and saw her not floating in mage-light, but seemingly there beside him. She was naked, her white hair wild around her shoulders, her pale skin carved with the lines of power. He could feel the touch of her hand on his face. He wondered if he was already dead and this was a last vision granted to him by the Mother-Creator. He wondered when the pain would end, and he looked away from her to see if the Black Haunts had come.

“Mam could have saved me,” he whispered to her. “With Treoraí’s Heart.”

“I have Lámh Shábhála,” Sevei told him. “And I have my love for you. It will have to do.” The mage-lights were still flowing, and it seemed to Kayne that she reached up and snatched a coil of them from the sky, bringing it down to him. She pressed the wild, snarling power against his chest: it burned and hissed and throbbed, pounding at his chest. Kayne cried out with the renewed pain and Sevei wailed with him as if she felt the pain herself, but she continued to press the mage-lights down against his body. He felt them break the skin and enter, the heat spreading through him, running through his blood and his sinews. The fury of it made him gasp . . . and he realized with the intake of breath that he
could
breathe, that the knives which seemed to have been inserted in his lungs had vanished.

He took a long, shuddering breath. “Sevei?”

“I’m here, Kayne.”

And she
was
there. The face he remembered was terribly changed and altered, but it
was
Sevei, and it was the Bán Cailleach at the same time. He could feel the power of Lámh Shábhála radiating from her, the mage-lights still pouring energy into the Great Cloch. He could see the others also, staring at her: Séarlait and Harik, their hands still entangled in bright threads; Laird O’Blathmhaic, the nearby gardai and the Fingerlanders. Sevei smiled at Kayne, and in response he lifted himself from his cot with a groan, his arms extended as if to enfold her in an embrace.

Sevei stepped back from him, her lips turning to a frown. “No,” she said loudly, shaking her head. “The scars . . . they hurt too much. I can’t bear to be touched, not even to wear clothing . . .”

Kayne could see the pain and discomfort in her face and the way she held her body, then. There was nothing sexual in her nudity; the intricate webbing of scars that covered her body glowed as if they were a silken coat reflecting the sun. He expected to see her holding Lámh Shábhála or to have the cloch dangling from a necklace around her neck, but it was not. The mage-light danced around her but rather than gathering around her hand, they seemed to lance directly into her chest. Through the radiance of the lights, he could see a pulsing emerald green buried within her, shimmering through her flesh and tinting her face, throat, and breasts with the hue of summer grass. Sevei sighed as the mage-lights continued to pour into the cloch, a twisting funnel of energy that coiled upward from her to the sky. She touched her hand to where Lámh Shábhála was trapped inside her, and the mage-lights curled reluctantly away like the touch of a jilted lover. The mage-lights began to fade, and he could hear the whispers all around them:

Séarlait had watched as she fed her own cloch. Now she released Winter and came running to him. She hugged Kayne fiercely, then nodded to Sevei, her eyes filled with tears. Harik and the laird watched from where they stood.

Sevei’s mouth lifted in a brief smile. She nodded to Séarlait. “So she’s the one,” she said to Kayne. “You need to introduce me, brother.”

THERE WAS A SOLITARY figure seated alone in the dust of the High Road as the vanguard of the army entered the Narrows.

It was a gloomy and overcast morning that promised a foul and wet afternoon, and there was an apparition in the road ahead of Tiarna Cairbre Kavanagh. The scouts for the vanguard had come back with the news, and the new commander of the Airgiallaian army, Tiarna Barra Rámonn, had ordered Cairbre out to see for himself, while Rámonn stayed well back with the main force. The person—whoever it was—was cloaked in a dark gray cloak that made it seem to be a piece of fallen cloud. The outriders pulled back on the reins of their horses, their sharp, suspicious gazes going from the lone person to the canyon walls around them. Cairbre, leading the group of two double-hands of riders, had heard how the cowardly Fingerlanders fought. He’d also seen vividly how they preferred ambush to honorable open combat, how their arrows could reach farther and strike deeper than those of the Tuatha, and so his group proceeded cautiously and slowly toward the person in the roadway.

The main force was yet several hundred strides down the torturous, winding path leading up to the sharp-spired crown of the Narrows. The wind shrieked through the confines of the pass, snapping at their clothing, and carried with it the clanking of armor and the groaning of the wagon wheels from the advancing army. Cairbre knew the waiting person could hear those sounds, too, yet whoever it was hadn’t moved.

Cairbre gestured to the closest riders and they pulled already-strung bows from their holders and put arrows to the strings; the outriders on the flanks gave him their hand signals:
clear.
Cairbre touched the Cloch Mór around his neck: Darkness, which could cast a pall of impenetrable night in which only its Holder could see. But enough arrows can defeat even a cloch—as Tiarna O Contratha had unfortunately discovered—and Cairbre wasn’t about to let himself fall prey to another of the Fingerlanders’ dishonorable traps. The vision of Tiarna O Contratha falling under the assault of the traitor Kayne Geraghty’s Blaze and the arrows of the Fingerlanders was all too present in his mind, and he wished that Tiarna Rámonn were also here. Had another Cloch Mór been with O Contratha, the former commander might well be alive.

Cairbre stayed well back, out of arrow range—even, he hoped, for the damned Fingerlander bows, and he was ready to throw false night around him and retreat behind the line at need.

The figure ahead appeared to be some ancient hag, but the scouts had told Tiarna Rámonn and Cairbre that she hadn’t responded to their challenges. “Did you try to move her?” Tiarna Rámonn had asked, and the scouts had shaken their heads.

“Tiarna, there was something
about
her. I didn’t want to get too near . . .”

Tiarna Rámonn had sighed as if disgusted at the scouts’ cowardice, but he also didn’t go himself. No, he sent Cairbre . . .

In the dim light, the wind flattened the dark clóca against the seated figure’s body and Cairbre could see the curve of breasts; the wind also plucked a lock of long gray-white hair from under the cowl and pushed back the cowl enough that Cairbre could glimpse a shadowed face that looked to be covered with wrinkles. “Out of our way, Aldwoman,” he called out loudly, his horse skittering nervously, “or today will be your last.”

The woman lifted her head at that and the wind caught the cowl, sliding it entirely back from the face. Caibre sucked in his breath. What he had taken for wrinkles were the netted lines of white scars marring an otherwise young face, and the unbound, long hair was not the sad gray of age but a pure white, and the eyes . . . The eyes were a horrible, unrelieved blackness in her face, darker than the storm clouds above. Cairbre realized who he faced in that instant, knew because he’d seen that face nearly every night when he’d lifted Darkness to the mage-lights, knew it because he’d felt her vast, awful presence sucking greedily at the lights from afar. The breath he took in left him.

The other riders heard his gasp, and several bowstrings
t-thunked
angrily without his command. The Bán Cailleach lifted one hand (the other clasped to her breast) and the double-hand of arrows went to sudden flame and dissolved to ash. The witch grimaced as if pained and let her clóca slip entirely from her body, standing as she did so. She was lithesome and might have been handsome but for the fact that her entire body was covered in the same scars that marred her face. A glow the color of swamp moss radiated from her torso. The Bán Cailleach didn’t seem to notice the wind or the cold nor care about her nudity.

“Do you command the army, Tiarna, or is it another?” she asked Caibre. Her eyes of starless night stared at him, seemingly boring into his soul.

“Tiarna Barra Rámonn has taken command since Tiarna O Contratha’s murder,” Caibre answered.
Had
to answer; he felt as if the Bán Cailleach tore the words from his mind.

“I know his family, if not the man, and I would hate to see them grieve,” the Witch-Holder said. “Go back to Tiarna Rámonn. Tell him that the war against the Fingerlands is over, and he is to take his army back to Dathúil.”

“Over?” Caibre answered, the word coming out before he could stop it. “After what the Fingerlanders have done, this war has only started. The Rí Airgialla—”

The Bán Cailleach’s right hand tightened to a fist at her breast and the words died as if the fingers had gripped Caibre’s own throat. “The Ríthe have made a terrible mistake,” she said. “They have slain the Healer Ard and the First Holder; they’ve ignored the true threat in pursuit of their own greed, and now they’ll pay for that arrogance. I won’t let them make another mistake now. Tell them that. Tell them that the Bán Cailleach refuses to allow them to come here and war against the Fingerlanders and my brother.”

Caibre blinked. “Your brother . . . ?” It struck him then. “You . . . you claim to be Bantiarna Geraghty?”

“Aye,” she said. “Not a claim, Tiarna, only the truth. I’m now the Holder of Lámh Shábhála and the one you call the Bán Cailleach. Tell them that also, Tiarna. Tell them that they needn’t bring their armies here to find me, for I will come to them. I’ll come to them very soon. Now—
Go
!”

Cairbre’s companions had been struck dumb. They sat on their horses in a jangling of anxious livery and armor. “Tiarna . . .” one of them whispered, and the fright in his voice made it quaver like that of an old man. “Maybe we should go back . . .”

Cairbre wanted to do exactly that, very much. He wanted to turn his horse and flee to the main mass of the army at full gallop. But he could also imagine giving his report to Tiarna Rámonn:
We were turned back by a lone woman who claimed to be the Bán Cailleach. . . .

The Bantiarna Geraghty—if that was who indeed she was—laughed as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Do you want proof to carry back with you?” she asked Cairbre, and her hand tightened again. Cairbre would have sworn that the scars on her body began to glow, radiating out from her center as if a fire had risen inside her. Aye, she
was
glowing, for he could see the shadows moving on the walls of the Narrows around him. Someone’s horse nickered in fright. “Do you need to see what the Pale Witch can do?” she asked, and now her voice boomed like thunder, so intense that it pushed them back, the horses retreating before the sound, their eyes showing white and large. “I will show you, then. I’ll show you so that they can all see it.”

The Bán Cailleach’s body was so bright now that it was like looking into the sun. Cairbre looked up and saw the storm clouds were rotating above her, two whirlpools of cloud that thickened and darkened until it seemed that two eddying, baleful eyes stared down from the heavens, storm-eyes as black as those of the Bán Cailleach. The moan of the wind had risen to a howl. The banner of Airgialla was torn from the hands of the young rider who carried it; the staff and banner went careening away, smashing against the cliff wall.

“I am Storm,” the Bán Cailleach called out. The voice boomed so loudly that Cairbre was certain that Tiarna Rámonn and the army below could hear it. The eyes far above suddenly wept: a torrent of rain lashing at them, a wind-driven burst that left them drenched and blinking from the fury of it. Cairbre wiped desperately at his face, trying to see through the downpour. The Bán Cailleach was walking forward toward them and Cairbre instinctively retreated with the others, backing slowly toward the two spires that marked the lip of the pass.

“I am Lightning,” she called, and in response twin flashes burst from the mage-eyes above, shattering the walls of the Narrows and sending boulders the size of cottages hurtling down. One struck the ground not three strides in front of Cairbre and just to the left of the Bán Cailleach; so close that Cairbre wondered for a moment if she’d been smashed. But no . . . she walked forward through the rain and mud, an emerald sun below the storm, and the storm-eyes above watched her.

“I am the Caller of the Filleadh,” she shouted, the din of her voice shaking more rocks from the walls of the pass, and Cairbre heard an answering shriek in the storm. Below the storm-eyes, two winged shapes fluttered down, seeming to be no bigger than birds at first but growing rapidly larger as they descended until Cairbre saw that their batlike wings were like the great sails on a warship and their scaled bodies—one red-black marbled with orange; the other darkest blue swirled with deep yellow—would have dwarfed the keep tower in Dathúil, and the claws on their feet were blades longer than a man. Their shrieks sent the blood in Cairbre’s veins to ice, and they landed on the spires of the Narrows, coiled snake heads glaring down from either side. They reared up, and the passage of the Narrows was roofed with an arch of awful fire from their mouths that fell thick and bright to the ground behind the Bán Cailleach. The horses whinnied in panic, a hand or more of Cairbre’s men turning their horses entirely and retreating at full speed.