The peace banner—a stylized red doe on a grass-green field—snapped as if angry to be bound to the pole of the tent. Kayne thought that perhaps it was. He held aside the flap of the tent to let Rodhlann, Harik, and Séarlait enter, then went inside himself.
There were three people inside, already seated at a table clad in white linen. Around the table wine had been poured into silver mugs and sweetmeats arranged on pewter plates. Kayne recognized the pattern chased into the metal rims of the goblets and carved into the backs of the chairs: he’d seen it a thousand times at home in Dún Laoghaire. These were the Ard’s settings.
He also recognized the two men and the woman who stood as they entered. The closest to them was Parin Mac Baoill of Tuath Airgialla, first cousin of Rí Morven Mac Baoill—“One-Eyed Parin,” who had lost an eye at Falcarragh and wore a patch over the empty socket. He also wore a torc of gold and silver around his neck, and Kayne realized with a start that it was the Rí Airgialla’s torc. Shay O Blaca of the Order of Gabair stood alongside Mac Baoill. The third person was, surprisingly to Kayne, Áine Martain, his mam’s Hand of the Heart. Where the other two were grim-faced and solemn, Áine was smiling broadly, obviously pleased to see Kayne. He greeted the Hand of the Heart first, not caring that he broke etiquette by ignoring the new Rí Mac Baoill and O Blaca. “Áine, it’s good to see you. I was worried, when I heard about Mam, that . . .”
He saw the smile soften and fade on her face, and a shimmer of moisture glisten in her eyes. “That was a horrible day,” she agreed, but then the smile returned. “But Tiarna Kayne, if you knew what has happened since she died . . . She is more loved than ever, and the healings I’ve witnessed on Cnocareilig, and the crowds who pray to her . . .” Áine seemed to realize that she might be saying too much, glancing back at the stern faces of her two companions.
Kayne smiled again at her, though his gaze went now to the others. “Welcome to Tuath Méar, the Finger,” he told them. O Blaca tightened his lips at that, and Parin Mac Baoill flushed visibly. “I see the torc of Airgialla around your neck, Tiarna Mac Baoill. I hope that’s an indication that Morven Mac Baoill has obeyed the Bán Cailleach.” He didn’t wait for the man’s answer but gestured to his companions. “You all know Harik, my da’s Hand and mine, and now the Holder of Bluefire. Rodhlann O Morchoe commands Tuath Méar’s army here in the Narrows. And this is Séarlait Geraghty—a Fingerlander, my wife, and the Holder of Winter. You remember Winter, don’t you, Parin? It used to adorn Mal Mac Baoill’s neck, until one of Séarlait’s arrows took him.”
Séarlait had refused to take the bow and quiver from around her shoulders, despite the peace flag.
“Let them see the arrows,”
she’d told Kayne.
“They know my fletching in Airgialla. Let them realize who I am.”
Parin’s lips curled into a scowl under his single-eyed stare, and Shay O Blaca put a hand on the man’s arm.
“We know the clochs you hold,” O Blaca said. “I know Harik well myself, and we’re pleased to meet the new Bantiarna Geraghty.” There was no pleasure in his expression and the word “Bantiarna” seemed to taste sour in his mouth. “But we also expected the Bán Cailleach . . . that is, your sister . . . to be here.”
“Sevei
was
here, and told me she expects to return soon,” Kayne answered carefully. “Her presence, or lack of it, has no effect on what we say here.”
“Indeed,” O Blaca answered. “She made her . . .” O Blaca paused, and Kayne could sense that he was choosing another word than the one he might have used. “. . . wishes quite clear in Dún Laoghaire. But we thought that she would be here for our negotiations. However . . .” He smiled at Kayne. “I’m sure we can discuss the situation without her.”
“These aren’t negotiations,” Kayne answered curtly, and O Blaca’s tentative smile vanished like frost in sunlight as Mac Baoill hissed in irritation. Áine, standing behind them, grinned broadly at Kayne. “Either the Ríthe have done what we requested or you haven’t, and our response—my sister’s and mine—will depend on your answer. Which is it?”
Parin and O Blaca exchanged glances once more, and the Rí nodded. O Blaca went to the rear of the tent and brought back a wooden box. He placed it on the table close to Kayne, then stepped back. Kayne lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in a bed of plush green velvet, was a silver torc chased in gold filigree. Kayne had last seen that torc around his mam’s neck. He reached out and stroked the cold metal with a forefinger, tracing the knotted patterns in the surface. “The torc of the Ard,” Mac Baoill said. “It will be yours, Tiarna Geraghty, as soon as you return with us to Dún Laoghaire and the Óenach has made the declaration official.”
“Dún Laoghaire?” Séarlait said. “Why does Kayne need to go to Dún Laoghaire?”
“Dún Laoghaire is the seat of the Ard, Bantiarna,” Mac Baoill answered. “All the Ards have been given their torc there, in Tuatha Halla during a proper Óenach with the Ríthe in attendance.” He smiled at Séarlait before turning his head to look at Kayne. “That’s why we’ve come: to accompany you back to Dún Laoghaire in a manner befitting an Ard. The Bantiarna may certainly come with us, and your Hand.”
“And Tuath Méar’s gardai? Our troops?” Rodhlann asked. “The new Rí Ard should be accompanied by those he knows are loyal to him and will protect him on the road.”
The eyebrow over Parin’s good eye sought to touch the fringe of curls on his forehead. “Our clochs and the gardai we have with us will be more than sufficient to protect us from brigands on the road, Commander O Morchoe,” he answered. “Certainly Tiarna Geraghty should bring any servants and aides that he needs. But the army of the Fing . . .” He grimaced. “. . . Tuath Méar should remain here.”
“Oh, Rodhlann’s not worried about
brigands,
” Séarlait told Mac Baoill.
“Someone who has the protection of the Bán Cailleach certainly would not be concerned with mere robbers,” Mac Baoill answered blandly. “Nor would they need an army for protection.”
“The Healer Ard will be watching over you as well,” Áine interjected. “She is now a Mionbandia in the favor of the Mother-Creator, and her protection will be over you, Tiarna Geraghty. The tuathánach are pleased that her son is the Rí Ard and her daughter the Bán Cailleach.”
O Blaca frowned deeply at that, glancing back sharply at the Hand of the Heart. Kayne found that pleasing.
So the Riocha are worried that Mam is as much a factor dead as she was alive. Good . . .
Kayne stroked the surface of the Ard’s torc again, remembering how it looked around his mam’s neck. He could feel Mac Baoill and O Blaca watching the gesture. Mac Baoill reached forward and slowly pushed the lid closed again as Kayne withdrew his hand. “You will have the torc in Dún Laoghaire,” he said, “after the Ríthe have done what they must do.”
“No,” Séarlait said. “I don’t trust them, Kayne. You can be named Ard here as easily as there, and with those around you who would lay down their lives for you.”
“Fingerlanders are too suspicious,” Parin said.
“And if we are, who has made us that way, Rí Mac Baoill?” Séarlait retorted. “The Tuatha, especially Tuath Airgialla, have taught us that to be wary is the best way to stay alive.”
“We get nowhere with this argument,” O Blaca interrupted. “Rí Mac Baoill, I think we can both understand the Bantiarna’s worry. And for your part, Bantiarna, you must know how difficult this has been for the Ríthe. Rí Morven Mac Baoill has exiled himself. Doyle Mac Ard has joined him, giving up the torc of the Ard. The Ríthe have agreed to name your husband as Rí Ard, and to grant seats in Tuatha Halla to both Rí MacEagan of Inish Thuaidh and whomever Tuath Méar names as Rí. The Óenach has given the Bán Cailleach all that she asked for, and those were difficult and hard decisions.” O Blaca stared directly at Kayne, holding his gaze. “The new Ard will have even harder decisions to make in the future. We’ll need to work together from now on, Tiarna. It’s time—it’s well
past
time—that we learned to trust each other.”
Kayne felt Séarlait come alongside him. Her hand grasped his arm, tightening around it, but she was silent. Kayne held O Blaca’s gaze for a long breath, and finally nodded. “You’re right, Máister O Blaca. It is time. We’ll ride with you: Séarlait, Harik, and I. Rodhlann will remain here with the troops. We only need a stripe or two to prepare.”
O Blaca relaxed visibly. For the first time, a smile came to his face. “I’m pleased to hear that, Tiarna,” he said. “We’ll coordinate with your Hand, then. Harik, if you’ll remain with us . . .”
Outside, as they walked back to their own tent, Séarlait’s silence seemed deafening to Kayne. “What is it?” he asked her finally.
He thought that she wasn’t going to answer, but her shoulder lifted with a heavy sigh and she turned as she raised the flap of the tent. “If you don’t consider my advice worth listening to, then why did you bind yourself to me? Or is it just that you preferred me when I couldn’t speak to you?”
“You don’t understand, Séarlait,” he began, then realized as her eyes narrowed that he’d said the wrong thing entirely. He shook his head as if he could shed the words like rainwater clinging to his hair. “I love you. You know that—or you should. I value your advice, but sometimes . . .” He reached out to stroke her cheek, but the way she glared at his hand made him stop before his fingers reached her. “Sometimes we can’t do as we might want to,” he finished. “Or even necessarily what we think is best.”
“Is that how you’ll govern as Rí Ard?” she asked him. “Not doing what you think is right or best but what you think is expedient?”
“That’s not fair, Séarlait,” he told her. He stepped past her into the tent. “Come in,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
“I don’t need to talk,” she told him. “I went years without talking. I prefer to act. I thought you did, too.”
Séarlait released the tent flap. The day was hidden in the twilight of the tent, and he heard her footsteps as she walked away.
46
Conclave of the Aware
SEVEI SAT ON the beach, her hand over Lámh Shábhála and letting just a touch of the energy inside waft out over the waves, letting it carry her thoughts out and down into the quiet of the sea.
We need to talk with each other again, Bhralhg. . . . I ask you to come to me . . . Please, Bhralhg . . .
The water, in a protected cove not far from Thall Coill, was a flat and translucent green through which she could see the flitting, darker shapes of small fish. Beyond the curving spit of rocks and in the driving wind, the water quickly become choppy and frothed with whitecaps. In the two days she’d been here now, she’d been alone except for the company of a small group of brown harbor seals who came over curiously when she’d changed to seal form, swimming with her as she chased and caught the sweetfish in the cove.
But though she could feel the presence of blue seals and, especially, Bhralhg carrying the magical salmon of power, Bradán an Chumhacht, they’d not shown themselves or answered her call.
“They’ll never answer,”
she heard her gram say inside Lámh Shábhála.
“I used them poorly and I used them hard—Thraisha, Garrentha, Dhegli, Challa—and they won’t trust the Holder of Lámh Shábhála ever again. It’s my fault . . .”
“Hush, Gram,” Sevei said aloud, the sounds of her own voice surprising her in the cool air. She could see her breath in the air. She allowed a trickle of Lámh Shábhála’s energy to radiate over her to warm her skin. Her body glowed like a moon in the dusk, her flesh as cracked and marred as that of the pale disk. “The sun’s almost gone. When the mage-lights come tonight, I’ll leave. But for now there’s still time.”
She cast the power of Lámh Shábhála like a net over the sea, searching for Bhralhg. Though she couldn’t feel him, she could feel the
absence
of him, as if he were using Bradán an Chumhacht to actively deflect her. She kept feeling the not-Bhralhg, a void that slid through her mage-vision like a movement glimpsed in peripheral vision and then gone when she looked at it directly.
There was laughter in the air, and a darkness in the growing dimness of the water, and the scent of fish. “Come swim with me, Holder,” a voice said in her head as she heard the deep coughing moan of a seal and saw him, the noble head rising from the surf a few strides from the shore. “Come swim with me.” Then the head dipped into the water again.
“. . . Don’t trust them . . .”
“Be quiet, Gram,” she said to the ghost, and she walked quickly down the wet shingle until the waves lapped at her ankles, her calves. As the water splashed, it first felt impossibly cold, then just as strangely warm and she was no longer running but swimming with powerful wriggling of flukes and body. She saw Bhralhg in the quickly-dimming light of the sun and followed the trail of his wake, out of the cove and into the rolling, vital surge of the ocean, tasting the salt and the faint sweet wash of rainwater from the shore. The world underneath the surface was deep blue and would have been too dark for Daoine eyes, but she could see from the shimmering cap of the water above to the kelp-laden rocks of the deepening floor. The light of the failing sun painted steeply-angled, waving columns that bloodied the water; fainter wedges of silver were moonlight, growing stronger with each moment. There were clouds in the thick atmosphere of the water: heavy silt kicked up from the bottom by the waves; the pale, drifting snowfall of plankton and algae; the flashing, swiftly-passing schools of fish.
They flew through the hues of day and night above the landscape that the stone-walkers never saw, side by side. Bhralhg said nothing but swam strongly, heading out to deeper water before curving north. Night fell as they traveled, and Sevei thought that at least a few stripes must have passed before they came to land again, hauling out on a rocky shelf. “Here,” Bhralhg said. “I brought you here to meet Issine, the Eldest. He has been here since before your people came to this land, before the people before you and the people before them. He existed even before the Saimhóir, the Earc Tine, the Daoine, the Bunús Muintir, the great eagles, or the dire wolves became Aware.”