Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (73 page)

The bluff was all he had, but if Rí Mallaghan was worried by the threat, it didn’t show in his face. “We have enough clochs and more,” he answered. “We’ll have two more now than we had when we came here, in fact.”

“No!”
The shout brought Kayne’s head back around. He saw Séarlait let herself fall sideways from her horse, surprising Harik. It nearly worked. Harik started to fall with her, almost wrenched from the back of his steed. But he caught himself and kept his grip on Séarlait’s hair, the muscles in his arm cording as he held her body upright by her braided tresses, even as the horses bucked and shuffled nervously at the commotion. Séarlait twisted, trying to pull away from him. He reached over her horse, slicing at her with his knife hand.

Kayne saw blood flow. Too much blood . . .

Kayne’s fingers found Blaze and tightened around the sharp facets. He let the Cloch Mór bloom open like a poisonous flower. His sight went as red as the gem he held, as red as the blood spilling over the front of Séarlait’s clóca, and his anger struck Harik full force. The man was ripped bodily from his horse, dead even before his corpse hit the ground, his chest and head a ruin of bone and flesh. Séarlait stumbled away, one hand on the wound that gaped from neck to shoulder, and the other on Winter. Her cloch opened cold and bright.

It was not alone.

In his cloch-sight, Kayne saw the other Clochs Mór open as well: more than he wanted to count. He threw up a wall even as Rí Mallaghan opened his cloch, as a glowing yellow dragon appeared around Doyle Mac Ard . . .

. . . as Padraic, hesitating, started to reach for his cloch and then, strangely, vanished with a small thunderclap of air.

Kayne had no time to wonder about that. He ran to Séarlait, one arm pressing her to him even as she placed a barrier of cold ice around them. He could see the line of the terrible cut from Harik’s blade along her neck, very near where she’d once borne the scars of old wounds. The blood was pulsing as it ran from her, staining his own clothes. Her eyes were strangely distant, focused somewhere beyond him. “I’m sorry, Séarlait,” Kayne whispered to her. “We’re going to die here.”

“Dying doesn’t matter, my love,” Séarlait told him, her voice gurgling with blood. She coughed, spattering red over both of them. “It’s only how we die that matters.”

“Then we’ll die well,” he answered.

In mage-sight, Kayne saw shapes and lights rushing toward them, and the walls they had thrown up around them shuddered and cracked under the assault of a dozen clochs. The battering of the mage-stones were the blows of unyielding cudgels against Kayne’s body. He gasped, feeling each strike against the wall; Séarlait moaned alongside him. She was deadweight in his arm now, and he could no longer hold her. He let her slump to the ground alongside him. As if through a dark and smoky glass, he could see the Clochs Mór gathering, crows around dying animals. They surrounded them, though there were but a few on the forest side of the road.

It was still too many. Kayne could not even distinguish the attributes of the clochs that besieged their defenses: he could hear the scrabbling of wolfish claws, feel the whip-strikes of energy, hear the gibbering of skeletal warriors and sense the blows of an angry demon and the smashing of immense fists. Already Blaze’s fiery wall was fading and growing thin, and there were terrible black cracks in Winter’s shield, and Séarlait’s hands were loosening around the cloch. Her breath rattled loudly in his ears.

There was no opportunity for them to retaliate. It was all they could do to keep the attacks from overwhelming them. Their defensive walls shrank around them, pushing back, until they were surrounded tightly by fire and smoke and light. A bolt of pure energy lanced through their mingled defenses and Kayne tried to shift his wall nearly too late: the bolt, deflected, struck earth just before Séarlait. Winter’s wall vanished for a moment as her hand released her cloch—Kayne looking down at her in panic and concern, seeing the sallow whiteness of her skin and her closed eyes—then the wall returned as she groped for Winter again. Her eyes fluttered open.

“Go,” she told him. “Run.”

“Not without you.”

“You’re already without me,” she said. She coughed again, and blood spurted thick from her mouth. “Let me give you this gift, my love. Run to the woods . . .” She looked at the two figures that stood, radiant in mage-sight, between them and the trees. The attack thundered around them. Her fingers tightened around the stone, and in his mage-sight, he saw white light blossom around her: the full power that was left in Winter, all gathered up. She threw it at the mages between them and the forest.

The two green-robes went down. Séarlait collapsed. Winter fell dead and empty from her hand. “Séarlait!”

There was no answer. Kayne gathered the rapidly-waning energy within his cloch, the power burning him as if he were trying to handle fire. He pulled the chain of Blaze from around his neck, holding the stone in his hand and gathering its power to himself. He reached down and picked up Séarlait’s limp, unresisting body. The Holders around them sensed the movement, and Kayne felt their hunger. He felt the mind-storm gathering, the red lightning.

He started to half run, half stagger toward the woods, toward the bodies of the mages Séarlait had rendered unconscious or dead. The other clochs erupted, their images ready to smash him.

At the same moment, he saw the golden dragon—Uncle Doyle’s cloch—leap from where it hovered above the village and soar toward Kayne, with fire vomiting from its mouth and eyes as red and angry as the sun, its great wings beating and its clawed feet extended for a strike.

Kayne knew they were irrevocably lost.

Somewhere close by, a wolf bayed, its howl sounding like wailing words.

“Uncle Doyle,” Kayne said, and Doyle could hear the disgust in the young man’s voice. Despite his desperate position, there seemed to be no fear in him. He was, Doyle realized, very much his parents’ child. Doyle felt hollow and disconnected, as if the guilt he’d borne for so long had gnawed away all of his insides and left him only a shell. He felt nothing else. “I should have known. What’s the matter, Uncle? Wasn’t it enough that you killed Mam and Gram?”

It wasn’t me,
Doyle wanted to shout to the boy.
It was Rí Mallaghan; I was just his pawn. I did what I was told I had to do to keep my own family alive and safe, and that’s my shame and I’ll answer to the Mother-Creator for it. None of your family should ever have died, especially your mam, but the blame is not all on me. Please say it’s not all on me . . .

But Doyle already knew there would be no absolution. He glanced at the grinning, smug Rí Mallaghan; Kayne followed his gaze. “Ah, so Uncle Doyle’s just a lackey here, and you’re the one in charge, Rí. My sister’s going to be terribly disappointed in all of you . . .”

Kayne was still talking but he heard none of it. Doyle glanced at Padraic, at the paleness of his son’s face.
The two of them used to play together, running across the keep grounds waving mock swords or holding up stones in their hands as if they were clochs and fighting imaginary enemies together. Friends should not be forced to kill friends . . .
Doyle looked pleadingly at Shay, nodding with his head toward Padraic. O Blaca nodded slightly, shifting so that he stood directly behind the young man.

Doyle heard Rí Mallaghan’s voice now, interrupting Kayne. “We have enough clochs, and more,” the man said, his voice almost amused. “Two more now than we had when we came here, in fact.”

“No!”
The shout came from the Fingerlander woman Harik was holding, startling all of them. She fell from the horse—Doyle wondering whether Harik had just slit her throat—but then there was no time for thinking as the clochs erupted all around, as a quick burst from Blaze in Kayne’s hand struck the traitor Harik, killing him immediately. Doyle opened Snapdragon, but his eyes were on Padraic, not Kayne. His son was waiting, his hand hovering over Snarl but not touching the gem. Doyle understood the hesitation:
all the time they’d spent together. The laughter, the games . . .

Shay responded even as Padraic seemed to shake himself and start to take the cloch in his hand. In Doyle’s mage-sight, a glow enveloped Padraic, a brightness that collapsed around him suddenly and vanished in a whirling flare like a stone dropped into a bonfire. When the sparks were gone, so was Padraic. Shay O Blaca slid quickly to the back of the Riocha.

The dragon roared as if Doyle’s sorrow were the fire that lived inside it.

Kayne and the Fingerlander woman had already thrown up defenses against the power the assembled mages threw at them, but Doyle could see that the woman was mortally wounded from Harik’s blade. The Riocha besieged the walls of mingled ice and fire with mage-armies and lines of arcing, raw energy. Fleeting shadows brighter than those of the sun pursued each other over the landscape. Doyle allowed himself a moment of grudging admiration. Neither of the two were schooled mages and neither of them had held their clochs na thintrí for long, but the injured woman fought with a raw ferocity that compensated for her lack of skill, and Kayne . . . Kayne handled Blaze with a natural grace, the damnable Aoire elegance, the undeniable talent that his gram, his mam, and his sister had also possessed.

But fury and grace would not be enough. Not here. That was obvious to everyone around them. Doyle watched their defenses weaken and bend under the assault and the cracks begin to appear. “Doyle!” He realized that Rí Mallaghan had been calling him for some time. “We need you—take Snapdragon to them. We can finish them now . . .”

That was true, Doyle saw. Kayne and Séarlait had drawn back their defenses into a compact shell around them; with his true eyes, Doyle saw Kayne stumble backward toward the trees that bordered the road, dragging the woman with him. There were two mages of the Order there in their green clócas, and Doyle realized what they intended: it was what Doyle might have attempted himself—they would try to retreat to the woods. The plan was desperate and had no chance of success, but through the dragon’s eyes Doyle could see the woman gathering the remaining energy in her cloch.

Doyle could have called out. A simple movement of their encircling forces would have been enough to forestall the attempt. He remained silent. He let them move.

The Fingerlander put all her power into the attack, sending the mages between them and the forest reeling into unconsciousness. Doyle heard Rí Mallaghan scream in anger; the Riocha’s clochs attacked Kayne as one in all their manifestations, and the young man’s shield was tattered and broken. Doyle sent the dragon leaping forward toward Kayne with fire and claws and teeth . . .

. . . and turned just in front of him, interposing Snapdragon between Kayne and the Riocha. For a moment, the mages halted in mid-attack, wondering what Doyle intended.

A wolf howled—not a mage-wolf, but a living one—and then another, and what Doyle saw emerging from the forest made him laugh bitterly.
Kayne has the Aoire luck, too . . .

“Go!” Doyle whispered and the dragon roared the same word to Kayne from its cavernous mouth. “Hurry!” Doyle
was
the dragon now; he lifted himself up, claws extended, the fire drooling from his mouth and his great wings cupping air as he launched himself toward Rí Mallaghan. He didn’t look behind to see if Kayne obeyed; he didn’t dare. He saw only Torin Mallaghan and his own guilt and this one, final chance to assuage it; he felt only the need to lose himself in fire and take out the person who had lost him his wife, his children, and his self-respect. To burn away the guilt of a loyalty he should never have given and had held onto for far too long.

He never made it to Rí Mallaghan. Five or six Clochs Mór struck Doyle at once, from all sides. A pack of ethereal wolves ripped the dragon’s scaled side; lightning shredded the delicate tissue of the wings; a great, invisible fist batted him from the sky; a black tornado hurled him to ground; and he saw his da, standing over him with a sword in his hand.

“You failed me, son,” his da said as Doyle lifted a futile hand against the upraised blade. “You always failed me.”

The blade slashed down, and the dragon poured its burning blood on the grass.