Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (86 page)

He also saw the Heart, lying in the steaming, open ruin of Ennis’ palm.

When he saw Sevei attack Ennis, Kayne leaped down from his horse, running toward them. But in the moment it took to cover the few strides between them, it was over. “No!” Kayne screamed even as he reached for Sevei, wondering how he could stop her, but Ennis was already gone. “Sevei! What in the Mother’s name have you done!”

“I did what I thought best,” she answered. Her voice was distant, distracted, as if she were listening to someone else and only answered because he annoyed her. Lámh Shábhála was searing through the skin of her body; the scars bright enough that he had to shade his eyes, and the mass of tangled hair around her head was a sun. She was an unbearable noon fallen to earth, but her eyes contained midnight, expressionless. The light was a wall that had pushed everyone back around from them. They stood in a quiet circle in the midst of the battle.

Kayne saw the Arruk that Ennis had been riding drop his bloodied jaka and dart forward toward the body of his brother. The creature plucked Treoraí’s Heart from Ennis’ blackened hand. “Sevei!” he shouted. “The Arruk—”

She looked at the Arruk, watched as the beast closed its hand around his mam’s cloch. The glow around her brightened and spread out until it touched the Arruk and took him in.

He didn’t hide in the light—Sevei knew no Arruk would ever cower. She touched the Arruk’s mind, marveling at the strangeness of it. She plucked memories from him, examining them and letting them drop away.

. . . a surprising, terrifying ache inside him as he looked down at Ennis Svarti’s body . . .
“Cima,” she said, taking the name she found there. “I can’t let you keep Treoraí’s Heart.”

“If I die, I’ll find Cudak Zvati even faster,” he told her. He carefully lowered his head so that she could see none of the bright scales of his throat. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“. . . kill the creature,”
Gram whispered inside her.
“. . . do it . . .”

She did not. Instead, she pushed herself deeper into Cima’s mind.
Cudak Zvati . . . the search we’ve been told we must undertake . . . seeing the image of Cudak carved in the wall . . . the yearning to reach the place from where the sky-net grows . . . the gift of Cudak waiting for us . . .

Sevei saw everything: what Cima had experienced, what the Arruk searched for, their belief and their quest.

And she saw more.

“They will call you a traitor . . .”
her gram hissed.

“Here’s what you can do . . .”
That was Carrohkai, her voice loudest of all.
“Let me show you . . .”

Sevei could not hold back the quick laugh that tasted bitter on her tongue as she saw the places inside Lámh Shábhála that Carrohkai knew. “I will take you to Cudak Zvati, Cima,” she said. “You alone. But the rest of you must go back.”

“No.” His refusal was sharp. She could feel his mind searching for the words, words that were not in his vocabulary but in hers. “We Arruk do not retreat. We do not surrender. We would rather all die here than do that.”

“I’m not asking for you to do either,” she told him.

Kayne thought that Sevei would smash the Arruk as he would have done, as he yearned to do. But when the glow faded, the creature was still holding the Heart and Sevei was nodding to him. “Damn it, Sevei!” He clutched Blaze. There was still a vestige of power in the cloch.

Desperate, he looked back at Edana. She was staring from her horse toward Sevei, to Ennis’ body, to the Arruk holding the Heart. She blinked, and the stasis broke. She frowned, taking her own cloch in her hand again. The mage-demon snarled next to Kayne.

“Sevei, with you here, we can take the Arruk,” Kayne said urgently. “We can end this now.” He looked quickly around; outside the ring that Sevei kept around them, the battle was still raging. He could see the clochs and spell-sticks disgorging death, hear the clash of metal and the screams of the dying.

She smiled at him, and for that moment she seemed to be only Sevei once more. “I’m sorry, Kayne.”

“Sevei—”

“I love you, Kayne. I’m sorry. But there’s no victory here. There never was, not for either Daoine or Arruk.”

She closed her seal-black eyes. The mage-demon screamed and the Arruk holding the Heart gaped as scarlet light leaped from his hand toward Sevei. Kayne felt Lámh Shábhála’s touch on Blaze at the same moment, as if every drop of stored mage-light within it was being sucked from the cloch, rushing outward toward Sevei and Lámh Shábhála. The ring around them brightened, flared, and vanished.

Now rippling, luminous walls radiated out from Lámh Shábhála. Snaking, curling, moving so rapidly that Kayne could barely follow them, they raced through the clusters of fighting Daoine and Arruk, separating the two, pushing one away from the other. Kayne saw, on either side, two huge columns of light erupt and fade, accompanied by numerous small ones, and he knew that Lámh Shábhála had stolen the essences of Snarl and Firerock as well as the slow magic within the Svartis’ spell-sticks. He looked down at his hand; he might as well have been grasping a pebble from the ocean shore. Blaze was a dead thing in his hand.

“Sevei!” he cried. “What have you done?”

Holding the walls between the armies took all of her attention, all of her power, but Lámh Shábhála’s power was limited, even for the Bán Cailleach. Sevei grimaced with the effort of holding it, wondering how she could do the rest.

“.
. . in the end, you fail, like all the rest . . .”

“Silence!” she shouted at them, and the word pounded in her head, the wall quivering with its violence. She tried to think, but the power hummed so loudly around her that she could not. The energy hissed and fumed and snarled in every muscle, every fiber of her being. The scars on her body were lines of molting, flowing lava. The power she held—plucked from all the clochs and the slow magic in the Arruk spell-sticks, mixed and bound with Lámh Shábhála—threatened to burst out from her. She was a fragile clay pot full to bursting, and she were falling, falling toward sharp rocks . . .

The voices of the old Holders were right. She was going to fail. She could not do what she wanted to do, not if she had to hold this wall. And if the wall fell, the battle would begin again, and this time the Daoine would have no magic at all against the Arruk, and she would have slain her brother for nothing. . . .

She thought she heard Kayne calling to her, but his voice was lost in the roaring of the mage-light’s power.

Above, she felt Kekeri fold his great wings and stoop, coming to land awkwardly near her. Because her eyes were closed with the effort of maintaining the bright walls that now ran from one side of the Narrows to the other, she saw him only in her mage-vision, a shape of shifting fire. Others accompanied him: two stone-gray forms to either side of the pass that were Créneach; the blue-black, dark radiance of the Saimhóir, resting in the cold pools of water nearest the pass; a Bunús Muintir whose slow magics shimmered emerald, the sliding elusive brown of a dire wolf in a nearby copse of pines; the aloof, keen pinpricks of a pair of eagles high above the pass . . .

“We who are Aware will take this burden,” Kekeri told her, his voice a growl that was felt more than heard. “Do what you must.”

“Thank you,” Sevei told him, and she felt them take from her the mage-wall between the Daoine and the Arruk. She fell, gasping. The glare of the wall shifted hues, no longer the green-shot white of Lámh Shábhála, but now a melding of a dozen tints and shades racing through the barrier. Sevei lay in the midst of the multihued glow, every breath a stab of blades in her chest, the cold air like acid flowing down her throat. She rolled on her side: the scrape of dirt on her skin was as a cruel hand scouring her body. She could no longer stand this pain; she could not rise again.

The voices of the Holders were a din in her mind: mocking, laughing, weeping, each of them telling her something different. Gram’s voice, Carrohkai’s voice . . . She strove to find it in the confusion, to hear her.
“You can do this . . . You must . . .”
The Bunús Muintir was there, her voice gaining strength as Sevei focused on it.
“Get up . . .”

“I can’t.”

Groaning, she rose. “Did it hurt you so much?” she asked Carrohkai. She thought she could see the Bunús Muintir woman in front of her, wavering like someone glimpsed across a bonfire.

“Worse still,”
Carrohkai told her.
“As it will become worse for you. But not for much longer.”

Sevei blinked. Carrohkai was gone. She stood in the center of the brilliant wall. Her hand was trembling as she took Lámh Shábhála up again, and she groaned again as she opened Lámh Shábhála to her mind once more. She shaped the energy, reaching out with ethereal hands to either side of the wall she’d made and plucking away two people there. She brought them to her in the center of the brightness: Kayne and Cima.