Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (77 page)

“T
RÁTHNÓNA maith duit,
Greada.”

Kyle MacEagan was standing with his longtime companion Alby near the fire, his arm around Alby’s thin waist. The torc of the Rí lay on the mantle, as if the old man found its burden too heavy around his neck. Sevei saw her great-da turn at her greeting; his hand dropped quickly away from Alby, who stepped back into the shadows near the hearth, as unobtrusive as a good servant should be. Kyle smiled quietly at Sevei, though his eyes remained sad and tired. “There haven’t been many good evenings about here lately,” he said to her. “You look like you’re in terrible pain, Sevei. Should I have Alby call the healer to prepare some kala bark for you?”

He started to gesture to Alby, but Sevei shook her head. Her skin was tingling painfully with the cold of the passage from Dún Laoghaire to Inishfeirm, then from Inishfeirm to Dún Kiil, and her mind was still reeling with the news that Edana had given her. She sniffed the air, and it seemed full of the scent of doom. The voices in her head whispered agreement.

“. . . .you can do more. You can do more . . .”
That last was Carrohkai Treemaster, and Sevei clung to the ancient Bunús woman’s voice as if it were a plank of wood in a storm-torn sea.

“I’m afraid not, Greada. The news isn’t good . . .” She told him then, and as she spoke, the words drove him to his chair and pushed him, hunched and weary, into the cushions. Midway through her tale, Alby quietly left the room. Kyle seemed diminished and far older when she finished.

“Our Ennis, with the Arruk . . .” he husked. He would not look at her.

“Aye,” she told him. “Greada, how many gardai can Inish Thuaidh bring to the Narrows in a hand and one of days?”

“A hand and one?” he grunted. “In good weather, it would be nearly a hand of days around the Tuatha and through the Airgialla passage. We would have only a day to muster the troops and supply the ships . . .” He shook his head. “A few hundred,” he said. “We’d have no time to take more than those in this township and maybe that of Be an Mhuilinn and Na Clocha Dubha. Maybe a hand or so of ships, and the gods would have to give us good winds.”

“The winds you’ll have,” Sevei told him. “I went first to Inishfeirm, and I’ve spoken to Maestra Caomhánach of the Order. Stormbringer will go with you, and so will many Bráthairs and Siúrs of the Order.”

“The Order, going out to battle once more.” Kyle sighed. “That’s a sight many always wished to see . . .” The door to his chamber opened with a soft groan of hinges and Alby reentered, carrying a tray with two steaming mugs on it. He gave one to Kyle and brought the other to Sevei. She could smell the kala bark in the steam. She smiled gratefully at Alby as she took the mug, enjoying the warmth it lent her hands. Her greada’s voice brought her attention back.

“But there won’t be any troops at all, and no ships for the Order,” he said. “The Comhairle might have named me Rí, but this . . . this expedition would require the Comhairle’s approval and cooperation, and it would take days just to get the clan-heads here so the Comhairle can meet. Even if they
were
here, the Comhairle still would never allow it. They would tell us that the Arruk have never crossed water, even when they could, and Inish Thuaidh is an island. Why should we come to the aid of our old enemies when the Arruk are no threat to us?” He held his own mug in his hands, forgotten.

It was the answer she’d expected, but hoped she wouldn’t hear. “Is that what you believe also, Greada?” she asked. “Answer me honestly.”

“. . . he was a good husband to me, but he should never have been Rí . . .”
Gram’s voice. Sevei shoved her back down:
“He’s more capable than you believe, Gram. I’m sure of that.”

She thought for a moment that he hadn’t heard her. He was staring at the curls of steam rising from his tea. Alby stood behind Kyle’s chair. The servant’s wrinkled hand touched the old man’s shoulder and Kyle lifted his head. “No,” he said finally. “It does us little good to survive here if our cousins and kin in the Tuatha are destroyed, even if the Arruk never come here at all.” He sighed. “The Comhairle will howl and scream and demand their title back, but I never wanted to be Rí in the first place.”

The voices of the Inish Holders within her shrieked their fury, though Gram’s was not among them.

“Shut up! Be quiet!”

“What?” her greada said, and Sevei started, realizing she’d spoken aloud. Kyle set the mug down, rising. He went to Sevei, standing before her. He lifted his arms as if to hug her and Sevei stepped back and brought up her hands. “Ah,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry for you, Sevei.” His right hand fingered the Cloch Mór on his chest. “I’ll gather as many gardai and soldiers as I can,” he told her. “By the Rí of Dún Kiil’s order. By the time the Comhairle realizes what’s happened, the Order’s mages will have arrived and the ships will be gone.” He paused. “I’ll sail with them.”

She looked at him: the leathery, wrinkled, and sagging skin of his face; the spotted scalp his hair had long ago deserted; the belly rounding under his clóca; the legs whose thinness even several wrappings of linen couldn’t hide; the hands that shook slightly as they touched Firerock in its cage of silver wire. “Greada, you’re needed here . . .”

“Don’t lie to me, great-daughter,” he said. “I’m too old for lies and half-truths. We both know that once I do this, I’ll no longer be Rí. And you’ll need all the Clochs Mór you can muster. Firerock served at the Battle of Dún Kiil. It’s time it served again.”

“Greada ...”

“Hush, child,” he told her, as if she were simply his great-daughter and not the Bán Cailleach at all. “Drink the kala bark, and let me make ready. Drink. Go on.”

He waited until she lifted the mug to her lips, then turned to Alby.

The Saimhóir changelings had returned to the water, the dire wolves had vanished into the darkness of the forest. Only the two Bunús Muintir were left: Beryn, the Protector of Thall Coill; and Keira, the Protector of Doire Coill.

On the hill where they sat, a cairn of rocks had been erected, newly piled. Their pale gray stones seemed white in the moonlight. Kayne was still wearing the clóca and léine he’d worn when they’d been attacked, dyed rusty brown by Séarlait’s lifeblood. Beryn had offered fresh clothing, but he’d only shaken his head, not caring. He’d cleaned her body, had laid it down and gathered the dirt and rocks to place over her without acknowledging Beryn’s and Keira’s silent help. He felt numb and distant, as if he were outside his body and watching himself work. He’d labored without rest until it was done.

Kayne stared at the cairn, Winter dangling on its chain in his hand. He’d been staring at the cloch and the grave since the sun was high in the sky without seeing either one of them. The grave was unreal. It was a dream. It was impossible.

“I’m sorry, Kayne,” Keira said at his side. Doire Coill’s guardian had been old when Kayne had last seen her a double-hand or more of years ago. Even then she’d relied on her staff to support her: a gnarled and twisted oaken branch as tall as herself. Now her ancient eyes looked him up and down as if appraising him as she sat next to the crackling branches. “I know there’s no comfort in this, but she would be glad that you lived. That’s what she wanted.”

“I don’t live,” Kayne told her. “Not anymore. I’m as dead as she is—my body just hasn’t realized it.”

The old woman grunted. Her hand stroked his arm in mute empathy.

Beryn stood a little aside from them, his gaze more on the shadowed wood than on the other two. He’d built a tiny fire on the hilltop, little more than a hand’s span in size, though still the trees seemed to groan in response, or perhaps that was only the wind through winter-bare branches. Kayne’s world had shrunk to the bare globe of the fire, ending in darkness beyond Séarlait’s cairn. “She should have had a pyre,” Kayne said. “That’s what her people do with their dead.”

“The Seanóir, the old trees, wouldn’t have liked that. This is their land, after all. But she will rest here, and the Greatness will take Séarlait up to Her and comfort her.”

Across the fire, Beryn lifted his head to the sky. Keira knotted arthritic fingers around the use-stained wood of her staff and stumped over to stand before Kayne, groaning as she moved. “The mage-lights are coming,” she said. “And so is your sister with them. Open your cloch to the lights and she’ll find you.”

“She’s about a day and a half too late,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

The old woman shrugged. “The Bán Cailleach goes where she must.” The mage-lights, brightening, lent their cool hues to her face, the illumination shifting over her features. Kayne could feel the pull of Blaze, yearning to be filled again with the power. The cloch’s insistence pulled his attention away from the cairn despite his grief. Beryn was chanting in the Bunús tongue, and the lights swirled above him. Even Keira looked away, lifting her staff toward the sky.

Kayne took Blaze in his hand.

The mage-lights were cold fire, and the energy within them radiated through his entire body, spreading out from his right hand to the rest of him. In his mage-sight, Blaze was a cavern of scarlet glass, and the power flowed through it like a subterranean river, rising higher to fill the rooms within it. He could feel the other Clochs Mór as well: the hateful cluster of the Ríthe not far away and the fierce, powerful tidal pull of the Bán Cailleach. His sister’s black eyes and scarred face drifted there in the lights. Her harsh gaze found him and for a moment he was caught in those eyes, snared, and they seemed to rush toward him . . .

“
Dia duit,
Brother,” he heard her say, and her voice resonated not only in the mage-lights but in the air. He turned around and saw her.

He said nothing. He saw her gaze go past him to Winter hanging empty on its chain in his left hand, to the cairn. Her obsidian eyes narrowed. The mage-lights still snared his hand and wrapped her body, but the stream that came down around Sevei was almost too bright to look at, glimmering with streams of all the hues he’d ever seen within them.

She frowned, the expression ghastly in that savaged, white face. “I’m sorry, Kayne. I’m so sorry . . .”

“You healed her, Sevei. You gave her hope. You told her that she’d be the Rí Ard’s wife. You said that the Ríthe would do as you said.” Kayne would not let her look away. He wanted her to see his face, wanted her to see the pain there, wanted her to
feel
it. He wanted to use his grief as a spear and thrust it into her.

“I don’t have an answer for you,” she said. Her lips trembled and a tear slid down her cheek. “But I understand how you feel; I saw my love die also and I know how you feel. Kayne, you understand that I never wanted this. Never. If I could have prevented it, or if I’d thought that everything would end this way . . .”

“You weren’t there,” he shouted at her, and was rewarded with a flinch.

“No, I wasn’t. We . . . I didn’t know the scope of the betrayal until . . .” Her gaze drifted to the cairn and back. “. . . too late.” She stopped, nodding to Beryn and Keira. “Thank you,” she said to them. “Thank you for coming to my brother when I couldn’t.”

“We wish we could have arrived sooner,” Keira answered.

“You did more than you had to.” She turned back to Kayne. “Kayne, I’m so sorry for your loss. If there was anything I could do to change it, I would. But I can’t, and as cold as this seems, I don’t have much time to stay here with you,” she told them. “I have to leave before the mage-lights fail. I have to go to the Ríthe.”

The Ríthe . . .
For a moment, he felt the world snap back around him, cold and dark and angry. “I’ll go with you,” Kayne said grimly. “We’ll meet them together.”

“No,” she told him. “You have to go elsewhere . . .” What she told him then made the darkness close back in around him. He was shattered and broken, his mind reeling. He’d released Blaze despite its hunger.

“Ennis?” he said wonderingly. “He’s with the Arruk? And in Talamh An Ghlas?”

“I was there when he was born, and I was the one who took the blue caul from his face,” Keira interjected. “I knew then that Ennis was destined for some great fate, but whether for good or ill . . . I didn’t tell your mam, but I feared for the worst.”

“Aye,” Sevei said, as Keira stepped back away from them. “That’s why I need you to go back to the Narrows, Kayne—you need to lead the troops that Aunt Edana and Greada are bringing.”

Kayne laughed, a dead and hollow sound. It sounded like a stranger’s chuckle to his ears. “You go, Sister,” he told her. “Take Lámh Shábhála there, where it might do some good. Let
me
go to the Ríthe.” In his vision, the stones of the cairn seemed to quiver in the firelight. “I have a score to settle with them, and I no longer care about my life at all. All that matters is that I take Rí Mallaghan, at least, to the Mother with me.”