Meriel started to the tent flap, but before she could reach it a hand slid the cloth aside. The face of the woman who entered gave Meriel a start of recognition: she was the mam they’d passed on the way into Ballicraigh. Her children were still with her: the babe in arms, now sleeping in a folded shawl sling wrapped over one shoulder, the redheaded one clinging shyly to her mam’s clothing. In the candlelight, Meriel could see the hollowness of the child’s eye sockets, the dark pouch of flesh hanging under them, the distended, swollen belly and crusted sores covering her lips and nostrils. The child wheezed as she breathed, her breath rattling in her lungs. The woman hesitated, as if unsure if she should be here, and started to turn away.
“What do you want to know, good lady?” Sevei called to her softly. She tapped the cards on the table. “I have the answers to your life here. You could know what the future holds for you for just a few coppers, or perhaps something you have to trade . . . ?”
The woman smiled, shaking her head.
“Nothing?” Sevei urged. “Some bauble that isn’t important to you, a trinket, perhaps a single coin. It needn’t be much.” Her eyes were on the woman’s wrist, where a half-dozen or so small coins hung from a bracelet of twisted string.
“I shouldn’t,” the woman answered. A thin hand twisted the coin bracelet around her wrist. “Though I wish—”
The red-haired girl coughed, a chest-racking paroxysm that left her gasping for breath. They all watched, the mam holding her concern in her face. “You want to know how it will be with your daughter,” Sevei said. “That’s the question you’ve brought to me. That’s what you most want to know.”
A nod.
“One coin,” Sevei told her. “The smallest one you have. That’s all I ask for the answer to that question.” A moment’s hesitation: then the woman untied the string and slid one of the coins from it. She placed it on the table and retied the string as Sevei took up the cards and gestured to the chair in front of her. She began laying out the array.
“This is very odd,” Sevei said, staring at the cards. She seemed genuinely shocked as she touched the cards with her fingertips, so different from the way she’d been all night that Meriel’s gaze went away from the little girl to Sevei. “Very odd, indeed . . .” but another cough took Meriel’s attention away again.
Meriel crouched down next to the girl. The child was wheezing badly, her chest moving rapidly. Meriel could smell the sickness on her breath and hear the rot in her lungs. The girl stared at her, venturing the smallest of shy smiles between the labored breaths. Meriel crouched down in front of her as Sevei laid down the last card and started giving the tale of the cards. The girl coughed again, a sound full of liquid and exhaustion. Blood flecked her lips when she looked at Meriel again. “Here,” Meriel whispered, and she reached out with the end of her sleeve to brush at the girl’s lips.
The cloch throbbed at Meriel’s breast. She touched it under her tunic, unthinkingly, and the power within it slipped out: burning, rushing through Meriel’s body to the point of contact with the girl and inside. Meriel gasped as a crushing weight slammed down hard upon her chest and her lungs seemed to fill with water. She was suffocating, feeling as if she were drowning from the inside. She tried to take a breath, and the effort made her cough, and the cough sent splinters of bone stabbing through her chest, skewering her. Meriel moaned, eyes wide in fright as she stared into the equally wide eyes of the little girl.
. . . so tired, but Mam made me walk here and my chest hurts so much but I like the colors of the Taisteal’s clothes . . . the lady has pretty hair Mam says that I’ll have pretty hair one day if the Mother-Creator doesn’t take me back the coughing hurts so much . . .
Then Meriel’s vision shifted, as if she were falling rapidly toward and through the girl. A red-imbued, nightmare landscape was all around her and the sound of a breath bellowed in her ears. Around her, there were clots of white, writhing fibers wrapped around scarlet nodules, and the power of the cloch went to each of them, searing the white to nothingness. Meriel felt each flare of power within her own chest. She screamed.
She pulled her hand away from the girl as if she’d touched a stewpot hung over a fire; she fell to the ground, and the girl tumbled in the other direction. “Cailin, what’s wrong?” she heard Sevei shouting, dimly, and heard the cry of the girl’s mam.
Her breath coming hard and fast, Meriel let go of the stone. The pain receded; the weight on her chest lightened and vanished, but the memory stayed. Of being inside the child. Of
being
the child.
Áine—that was my name. I was Áine.
“Cailin?”
Meriel shook her head and pushed herself up, standing shakily. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just . . . leave me alone a moment.”
The woman had picked up her child. “Mam, I can
breathe,
” the girl said wonderingly. She pointed at Meriel. “That lady took the hurt away.” She laughed and took a comically deep breath with her mouth wide. “See, Mam?”
The mam sobbed once, a great heaving cry as she hugged the girl tightly. They were all staring at Meriel.
It was Sevei who broke the silence. “You see the answer here,” she said, her forefinger stabbing one the cards, where a red-haired woman walked along the edge of a cliff, holding an oaken branch toward the sun. “That card’s called the Healer. And there, next to it, that’s the card of the Mother-Creator, and beside it, the Gifting Hand. That tells all: Cailin’s mam was gifted with the Healing Touch by the Mother-Creator, as was her great-mam before her. We have always wondered whether the Mother-Creator would give Cailin the Touch also.” Sevei’s gaze flicked over to Meriel; a glare that dared her to contradict. “It seems She finally has.”
“Is it true?” The hope and need to believe in the woman’s eyes was frightening to Meriel. The infant in the sling was crying. “Áine’s not going to die?”
Meriel’s hands were still shaking, and flashes of the awful sickness in the girl’s lungs kept returning. “No,” Meriel answered, realizing that they were all waiting for her to speak. “No, Áine’s not going to die. I see a long life for her.”
The woman gave a choking, abrupt sob, tightening her arms around her daughter. “Mam, you’re crushing me!” Áine said, and the woman laughed and cried at the same time as she released her, twin tears tracking down her cheeks. She pulled the coin bracelet from her wrist and placed it on the table atop the cards.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you both.”
“You don’t—” Meriel started to say, but Sevei’s hands had already clapped down on top of the coins.
“It’s the favor of the Mother-Creator,” Sevei said. “She has blessed Cailin, and Cailin has, in turn, given the blessing to Áine. Go on your way now,” she continued. “Look at poor Cailin; the effort has tired her and she must rest now.”
With profuse thanks, the trio left, Áine laughing and scampering ahead of her mam. When the tent flap fell back behind them, Sevei hurried over to it and tied it shut, dismissing the man who was waiting outside for his fortune to be told. Arms crossed, head tilted, she regarded Meriel. “You realize that the story’s going to be all over this village in the next stripe or less,” she said finally. “The girl’s cured? Truly?”
“Aye,” Meriel answered quietly, eyes downcast. “I think so, anyway. I don’t really know.”
“The clochmion?”
Meriel nodded.
“You might have told me what it could do.” When Meriel remained silent, Sevei finally sighed. Her arms unfolded. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. How often can you do this?”
“I’ve only used it twice,” Meriel admitted to her. “Both times the cloch was empty afterward. I can’t do anything until the mage-lights fill it again.”
“Fine,” Sevei said. “Then we save it for the really big miracles—make sure it’s somebody prominent or obviously sick and we’re getting well paid for it; half of the rest will end up thinking that they’re cured anyway even if you do nothing; the inevitable failures we’ll blame on a lack of favor from the Mother-Creator. And we’d best dye your hair black and straighten those curls so you look more like a Taisteal—we don’t want word getting to the wrong ears that someone matching the description of the Banrion’s daughter is performing healings. That will work.”
Meriel was shaking her head. “What are you talking about? I’m not going to do anything like that or let you dye my hair.”
Sevei snorted. “Oh, aye, you will. After the tale gets out tonight that we have a genuine healer in the clan who has the Mother’s Touch, they’ll come swarming in. If you think Nico’s going to miss the chance to relieve them of what they’re willing to pay for a chance to have their ills cured, well . . .”
Sevei walked over to the table and gathered up her cards. “He won’t entirely like it because it will bring attention to you and you’re supposed to be our little secret, but he also won’t be able to resist the profit. We’ll want to keep the clochmion hidden—the last thing we need is for the Riocha to figure out you have a cloch na thintrí; that would be too dangerous. We’d have tiarna coming here saying the Taisteal must have stolen it, and using that as an excuse to take the cloch . . .”
“Sevei—”
“. . . Maybe we’ll say that the Touch weakens you—that way we can control the number of people who see you, and help explain away the failures . . .”
“Sevei!” This time she heard Meriel and she stopped, the lid to the card box open, the cards in her hand.
“Was that card really the Healer?” Meriel asked. “And the rest of them? You said the pattern was very odd.”
Sevei gazed at her, the golden light of the candles reflecting on the glossy, satin strands of her hair. “There has to be a touch of truth in every deception,” she told Meriel, “or it will never work.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
Sevei came back to the table. She pointed to the chair across the table from her. “Sit,” she ordered Meriel, and placed the deck of cards in front of Meriel as she obeyed. “Shuffle the cards and then cut the deck once,” she said. With Sevei’s dark gaze on her, Meriel picked up the cards and did as she was told, finally lifting half the stack and setting it to one side. Sevei picked up the deck again, placing the cut portion on the bottom and dealing out the cards: three cards in the center of the table, then a spiraled array around it, then a line of five cards over and under the spiral. Meriel could see the one called the Healer again. Sevei sighed as she stared at the cards.
The woman said nothing for several breaths, gazing intently at the cards. “Sevei?” Meriel asked finally, and Sevei shook herself from reverie. She swept the cards together with a sweep of her hand.
“I’m too tired to do this right now,” she said as she gathered the colorful rectangles back into a deck. She pushed away from the table, went to the box and placed the cards inside as Meriel watched. “If you’re really interested in having your fortune told like some fool tuathánach, I’ll do it later.”
“But—” Meriel began, but Sevei slammed the lid down with a hard
crack.
“Right now we need to talk to Nico,” Sevei told her. “Before he hears about this from someone else. Come with me.”
20
The Searcher
“S
HE was here,two mornings ago.I can feel that ‘much. But this is as far as I can go, Owaine. It’s up to you now.”
The gulls wheeled and cried overhead. Dhegli, even in his human form, was obviously drawn and exhausted. He knelt on the wet shingle, his hair plastered across his forehead, a strand of kelp draped over one shoulder. Dhegli’s hand clutched Owaine’s, allowing Owaine to understand him. The currach in which Owaine had ridden lay on its side nearby. Owaine had been on the Westering Sea many times in his life, fishing and sailing, and he knew that it would have taken a normal vessel two or three days to get from Inishfeirm to where they now stood on the shore of Talamh an Ghlas. Dhegli had managed it in a day and night, pulling the currach tirelessly through the waves, calling on the power of Bradán an Chumhacht within him.
Owaine touched the cloch na thintrí around his neck and thought of Meriel, recalling her face. He let the power of the clochmion radiate out as far as he could send it, but there was no answering flare in his mind showing him where she was: Meriel wasn’t close. Dhegli shook his head, seeing Owaine’s attempt. “You waste your efforts, land-cousin,” he said. “They’ve already taken Meriel well inland. They wouldn’t have kept her near the water, knowing she could slip away from them easily if she escaped here.”
“I’ll try to find her,” Owaine said. He squinted at the landscape in front of him, to his eyes mostly a blur of green and brown. “But I’m not a woodsman, and my eyes . . .”
Dhegli gave him a weary smile. “I believe that you’ll try or I wouldn’t have brought you here. You’ll have help, Owaine—I see that with Bradán an Chumhacht; you’ll have help from sources that will surprise you. And if you succeed in finding Meriel, bring her back to the sea and have her call me and I’ll come for you. Both of you. Now go. Go . . .”
He released Owaine’s hand, and his voice faded in Owaine’s head. His mouth still worked, but the sound that came from it were like the sounds of the seals. As Owaine watched, Dhegli’s form began to change: the skin darkening and becoming covered with fine black hair, his body pulling into itself, the legs fusing together, the arms shrinking. In a few moments, it was a young bull Saimhóir with a scarred body who gazed back at Owaine.
“I’ll find her if I possibly can, Dhegli,” Owaine said. “And I’ll bring her back.”
Dhegli roared once, lifting his snout. Owaine waved to him and turned his back to the sea, trudging up the steep slope to where the green roof of a forest blanketed the hills beyond. In a few minutes, he was at the top of the nearest rise and he stopped to look down at the beach, peering myopically at the tiny crescent of sand. The dark blob that would have been Dhegli was gone—he’d returned to the sea.