Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (65 page)

“Thank you, Cima,” he said. The thought of Daj Svarti taking Treoraí’s Heart from him made Ennis feel sick. His shoulder throbbed in time to his racing heartbeat and he could feel warm blood tricking down his right side. The sharp smell of it—both Daoine and Arruk—filled the air, overpowering even the reek of the Arruk. The valley was muddied and scarred, the turf torn to expose the black earth underneath. All around him, Arruk strode carefully among the crumbled mounds of the fallen. They weren’t all dead: some moaned and twitched, while other lay terribly still. Somewhere close by, a Céile Mhór garda was screaming in agony—a long, shrieking wail, a pause for breath, then the wail again, over and over, until the endless scream went suddenly, jarringly silent. Ennis could see that the Arruk soldiers were prodding the wounded with the butt of their jaka. If the body was Daoine and it moved, they quickly reversed the pole arm so that the blade was down, and thrust the edge savagely into the body. If the wounded was Arruk and rose, they would move on; if the Arruk couldn’t rise on his own, though, they were dispatched as the Daoine had been.

Ennis realized that this was exactly what would have happened to him had Cima not been with him. The gorge rose in his throat and even the blue ghost could not hold it back. Ennis’ stomach convulsed and he bent over as he retched, vomiting harshly. The bile burned in his throat. After the spasms passed, he spat and wiped his mouth with his muddy, blood-spattered sleeve. Cima watched, head tilted curiously. “Better now?” he asked.

Ennis nodded. The blue ghost was moving and he followed it, standing erect again. The blue ghost ignored the tearing in his shoulder as the embedded arrow dug into muscles with the motion, and so Ennis did the same, though he wanted to moan and cry. “Where is Kurhv Kralj?” he and the blue ghost asked. “I need to speak with him.”

Cima pointed to a rise several strides away, where the banner of the Kralj fluttered. Ennis started to walk toward the Kralj, unable to stop the gasp that came as the first footstep jarred his shoulder. He leaned heavily on the spell-stick, a child walking like a withered old man. Cima walked beside him, an arm around Ennis’ waist in support. As they approached, Kurhv Kralj saw them and turned from the huddle of Mairki and their Svarti around him, Daj Svarti among them. Daj Svarti would not look at Ennis, but Kurhv Kralj’s face was full of what seemed to be genuine relief. “Ennis Svarti!” the Kralj cried aloud as Cima translated for Ennis. “I saw you fall, and I hoped you weren’t so badly hurt that we would need to send you to Cudak.”

You saw me fall and you didn’t even come to see how badly I was hurt, or protect me from Daj Svarti?
Ennis remembered once falling off a pony at Dún Laoghaire, and how Da and Mam had rushed over to him immediately, worried and frantic.
“Even the Kralj can’t show weakness,”
Gyl Svarti’s voice whispered to him.
“Especially the Kralj . . .”

“The battle’s over?” he asked Kurhv Kralj in halting, poor Arruk, and the Arruk bared his teeth in satisfaction.

“The Perakli who are still alive are running away like the sheep that they are, but they left half of their soldiers here,” Kurhv Kralj answered, and opened his mouth wide to roar once at the sky. The Mairki and Svarti around him did the same—Daj Svarti doing so belatedly—and their combined howl of triumph was echoed around the field. “It was your power that broke them, Ennis Svarti,” Kurhv Kralj said. “They couldn’t stand before you.”

The blue ghost smiled, and Ennis smiled with it. “No one can stand before Kurhv Kralj and Ennis Svarti,” he said as Cima translated. “No one. Kurhv Kralj will lead us to Cudak Zvati and the gift that Cudak holds for us.” The Arruk howled again with that, and the sound was so loud that it threatened to send Ennis reeling. The darkness threatened to close in around him again, and he took a step backward. Kurhv Kralj seemed to notice his injuries for the first time.

“That needs to be removed, and the wound cleaned,” he said. “Cima will take you to the Mender. Then you’ll return here.” He pointed east and north. “We will follow the call of the Cudak Zvati, and none will be able to resist us.”

They howled again, and Ennis shouted with them, his little-boy voice giving vent to all the pain and fright within himself that he dared not show.

For several stripes of the candle later, the pain was nearly too much to bear, and Sevei screamed and wept with the agony that lashed her body. The scars burned like ropes of fire, pulsing with each beat of her heart; her eyes felt like glowing coals set in her skull. The vision of the temple she’d placed at her mam’s barrow hovered before her like a mirage. She’d taken herself to a deserted beach on Inish Thuaidh, far from any of the fastnesses of the clans and well away from the few fishing villages; away, too, from the demands that Kayne and the Fingerlanders might have put on her.

There, she could be alone in her misery; there no one could see her weakness and she would not have to use Lámh Shábhála until the pain had subsided. If she had andúilleaf, she would have used it, quickly and gladly, and that frightened her more than anything, remembering the tales of Gram’s madness.

“. . . no, my love, that’s not a path you should take,”
Gram’s voice trembled at the thought.
“Don’t make the mistakes I made. When you’re here, all the pain will be gone for you. I promise you that much . . .”

The voices of the other ancient Holders screeched and chattered in her head like a flock of dark, angry crows and she couldn’t hold them back. They accused, they jeered, they suggested, they wailed with her. She tried to find her gram’s voice again, but she was submerged in the flood. It was Carrohkai Treemaster who came to her.

The first night, when the mage-lights came, she tried to resist their call, but Lámh Shábhála was starved and fierce and she couldn’t stop herself from opening herself to the wild power that lashed the clouds. She screamed as the mage-lights filled her and the cloch, and she wondered if those who fed their own stones that night could hear the sound of the Bán Cailleach’s anguish. When it was over, she huddled on the rocks, twitching and wishing she were dead, wishing she could give up Lámh Shábhála.

In her fevered sight, Sevei thought she saw a Bunús Muintir: a young woman no older than herself, naked, her brown body covered with the same horrible scars. She crouched before Sevei.
“I’m here,”
she said,
“and I’ll help you. I was able to bear this for a time; I know you can too. But you must do something for me, for my people . . .”

“I love you,” Séarlait said, and grinned at the sound of the words coming from her throat and mouth. Kayne grinned back.

“I wish the rest of the Fingerlanders felt the same. Maybe they’d stay, then,” he said.

She hugged his arm to her. “They can’t have you. Not the way I can. But they do love you, Kayne, in their way. You led them to a victory over the Riocha. That’s not something any Fingerlander will forget lightly. Now you have to let them do what they need to do. They’ll return to you when you call again.”

“Will they?”

She nodded and pressed his arm again, silent. Even with her voice returned to her, Séarlait still preferred to communicate in gestures. They stood at the highest point of the Narrows, looking eastward down to the tangled, crumpled landscape of the Finger, wrapped in mystery and mist. A caravan of Fingerlanders was moving down the High Road. As they prepared to turn a corner in the torturous descent, the rider at the front turned and waved back up to the them: Laird O’Blathmhaic, returning to his clan-home. Rodhlann, at least, had gained permission from Banlaird MacCanna to remain at the Narrows, but there were too few of the Fingerlander troops with him for Kayne’s comfort. Séarlait and Kayne waved back to the laird, and the distant figure turned around a knob of heather-wrapped stone and was lost. Kayne heard Séarlait sigh and clutch at him more tightly.

“Tiarna?”

Kayne looked away from where the rest of the caravan was following O’Blathmhaic into the morning. “What is it, Harik?”

“There are riders coming up the road from the west under the Ard’s banner. They’re also flying a peace banner.”

“How soon until they get here?” Kayne asked the Hand.

“At least two more stripes, and yet the Bán Cailleach’s not here,” he answered, sounding more angry than worried. “Have you heard from your sister yet?”

Kayne shook his head. He was also worried at Sevei’s absence, expecting her to return with the mage-lights one of the last few nights. It had been three days now since she’d left for Dún Laoghaire. “No,” he told Harik, “but we all felt her in the mage-lights last night. She’s safe. If anything has changed, she would have told us. She doesn’t need to be here. We’re not her only worry.” Kayne realized he was repeating what Séarlait had told him the night before:
“Your sister does what she must, and she gave you no promise to be here. You feel her, and she knows that tells you she’s safe . . .”

Harik nodded without speaking. His eyes did not appear convinced.

“Is that what you’re worried about, Harik?” Séarlait asked. “Or are you worried that the delegation will see how few soldiers we have here?”

Harik’s gaze slipped grudgingly from Kayne to Séarlait. His stare was flat and noncommittal. “
I
wouldn’t be impressed to see the Narrows held by so few hands of men, most of them not even Fingerlanders. I’d wonder about any agreement I might have made with the Bán Cailleach.”

“Then you’d make the same mistake that the Tuatha have always made,” Séarlait answered. “It’s the Finger itself that defends the clans. Not swords, not soldiers, but this very land.”

Harik sniffed. It might have been the chill of the morning or the onset of a cold. He looked back at Kayne. “Perhaps, Tiarna, we should meet them at the Narrows itself, where a few men might look like many and there could be more hidden in the rocks.”

Kayne forced down the annoyance he felt at Harik’s dis missive treatment of Séarlait: this wasn’t the time for a problem between himself and his Hand, but he told himself he’d remember this and other moments and deal with them afterward. “It’s more than the soldiers we have here, Harik. They’ll also see three Clochs Mór.” Kayne touched the stone at his chest, and Harik, unconsciously, mimicked the motion. “And they’ll remember what the Bán Cailleach did here, all alone, without any gardai at all. But your suggestion’s a good one; we’ll meet at the entrance to the Narrows. Have a tent set up there. We’ll ride there in half a stripe.”

Harik nodded, bowing his head to Kayne though his eyes never went again to Séarlait. He turned and left, already calling out orders to the gardai and sending one of them for Rodhlann.

Kayne could see that Séarlait watched Harik’s departure carefully, though she said nothing. “It’s not you,” he said, and Séarlait turned her head to him, raising a questioning eyebrow. “It’s not,” he insisted. “He’s céili giallnai, and sometimes the half-Riocha are worse than the Riocha themselves in the way they treat those of ‘lesser’ blood. It’s not you specifically; it would be anyone I loved who wasn’t Riocha or at least céili giallnai. He’s what we have to face in the Tuatha hands after hands after hands of generations. Change frightens the most those who have the most to lose.”

Séarlait shook her head. He thought she’d say nothing more than that, then she licked her lips. “Maybe,” she told him. “That sounds pretty, and maybe you’re right, but I think Harik simply doesn’t like me.” She leaned into Kayne again, hugging him to her as if holding him back from some precipice he couldn’t see. “And to tell the truth, Kayne, I’m not certain he likes you either.”