Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (47 page)

Doyle scoffed. “Aye. Ó Riain would be the real Rí Ard, no matter who Enean might marry or what title the Ríthe bestow on him. The Rí Infochla’s already on his way to Dún Laoghaire for the Council; he was gone when we returned from Inishduán. The timing couldn’t be worse, especially with poor Edana . . .” Doyle stopped, looking back at her, his gaze softening with the sight of her face. He sighed. “I can’t wait here, no matter how much I want to. Can Quickship send me to Dún Laoghaire and take you back to Lár Bhaile, Shay?” Laoghaire and take you back to Lár Bhaile, Shay?”

O Blaca touched the cloch, closing his eyes momentarily. He shook his head. “Not until the mage-lights come again.”

“Then we’ll hope they come tonight. I told Jenna what I intend to do for her treachery, and I will keep that vow.”

“We can’t go into Doire Coill after your niece, not even with a small army, Doyle. The Rí Gabair wouldn’t allow it. Besides, the tales I’ve heard . . .” O Blaca shivered.

“Perhaps,” Doyle answered, “but that’s for later. We need to take care of Labhrás Ó Riain first; even Rí Mallaghan would agree with that.” Doyle rubbed the back of his neck, weary, but with his mind roaring with nascent strategies. He clapped O Blaca on the shoulder, guiding him to the door. “I don’t deserve such friends as you, Shay, and I’ll make all this up to you. I promise. Rest for now. One of the Rí’s servants will get you a chamber and I’ll have them send you his best healer. We’ll talk more later . . .”

Dhegli would have drowned but for his milk-clan, who came to him as he drifted down into the cold, black embrace of the WaterMother. They lifted him to the air again.

Dhegli was utterly drained, his body aching from snout to flukes with the effort of fighting the two stone-walkers with their sky-stones. He’d never felt the power of the sky-stones before, but Garrentha—who had swallowed Bradán an Chumhacht before Dhegli—had told him that her predecessor, Thraisha, had died fighting sky-stones.

They were extraordinarily powerful. He knew that now.

For a time, Dhegli had been afraid that he would follow Thraisha’s example. It had taken every last dreg of power within him to finally extinguish the lights of the clochs, and afterward . . .

He didn’t remember afterward. He didn’t know whether Jenna had prevailed or fallen or where she might be. He’d come back to consciousness to find his milk-clan gathered around him, having pulled him up on a rock on the far side of the island. They were still there with him, and they had brought him fish to eat and had placed kelp over the worst of his wounds to start the healing. Slowly, he felt the power of Bradán an Chumhacht returning within him.

With it, he also felt the portion of that power he’d given Meriel. He half dragged his body down to the sea, and he looked southward.

“You can’t be thinking of going to Winter Home, Dhegli,” Challa, his milk-sister and sometimes-mate, said. “You still need time to recover. The stone-walkers aren’t worth this, not even our land-cousins. All they hold for you is death and misery. Look at what happened here—what did
you
gain for helping the First Holder? Thraisha, Garrentha . . . Do you plan to add your name to that list?”

“She’s there,” he answered.

Challa coughed derisively. “What can you offer her, or she offer you beyond a dalliance for a few hours every so often? You’re Water-snared, Dhegli; she’s Earth-snared. Neither one of you can ever change that, and the
Saimhóir
are your charge, not the stone-walkers.”

“Yet the water does meet the earth, always.”

Challa snorted. “Aye, it does. The water pounds against the earth endlessly: beating at it, tearing it down, frothing in anger and frustration the whole time. You really should choose a better metaphor.”

Dhegli bobbed his dark head in acknowledgment. “You’re right, Challa. And I know that your judgment in this is probably better than my own. But . . .” He took a breath, not quite knowing how to say it.

“But my advice comes from my head and your heart is singing too loud for you to hear it,” she finished for him.

He brushed his flank against her. He barked a short laugh. “Aye,” he answered. “It sings very loudly.”

Challa jumped from the rocks into a crashing wave. A few moments later, her whiskered head appeared in the surf well out from the shore. “When?” she called, her voice thin against the roar of the wind and the incessant pounding of the waves against the rocks.

“Now,” he told her. “Before my head realizes that I should listen to you.” Grunting with the effort of moving his stiff and sore body, he waddled to the edge of the rock and waited. A green wave rose, cool and inviting. He plunged in as it crested and foamed, relishing the embrace of the water. He saw Challa’s body against the bright roof of the sea and rose alongside her, breaking into the air again with a sniff and shake of his head.

“I’ll come with you,” she said to him. “Saimhóir should always have milk-kin with them.”

“Thank you. I may need your strength.”

“I’ve no doubt of that,” she told him. “I’ve no doubt of that at all.”

T
HE MAGE-LIGHTS did come the next night, and Meriel filled the clochmion once again. Keira, with a thoughtful expression on her weathered face, crouched nearby as Meriel lifted the cloch to the sky. The mage-lights began to fade and Meriel sighed and released the cloch though tendrils of color still netted the stars. Meriel leaned on the staff Keira had lent her, exhausted, not daring to take too deep a breath because of her broken ribs. She didn’t want to cry out, knowing it would bring Owaine—watching her from the entrance of the cavern—over to her.

When Meriel had recovered her breath, she closed her hand around the cloch again, this time opening it to release the captured energy. In the cloch-vision, she could see herself and the pus-yellow threads of the pain through her body, the red-orange of the fractured ribs. She send the mage-light toward them, expecting to feel the pain redoubled for a moment, then ease and relief as Treoraí’s Heart healed the damage within her.

The mage-light burned in her cloch vision but it didn’t—it wouldn’t—touch her, even though she bent her will to it. There was an unseen barrier around her; she couldn’t reach into herself as she did with the others. The power of the clochmion flared all around her as a nimbus of power, but it came no closer.

She could not heal herself.

She brought the energy back into Treoraí’s Heart and opened her fingers, blinking back tears and trying not to show her disappointment. Keira was still watching and Meriel lifted her eyebrows toward the Bunús as she leaned again on the staff.

“You knew?” Meriel said, as much statement as question, and Keira shrugged under her furs.

“I wondered all along,” the woman answered. “Look at the mage-scars on your hand—the cloch you bear is far more than a simple clochmion. They don’t scar their Holders at all. Also, it is truly Treoraí’s Heart, the most personal gift the Créneach could give; it isn’t meant for the selfish. The stone allows you to take away another person’s pain; but your own you have to bear by yourself.”

Meriel noticed Owaine squinting curiously in their direction. She flicked a quick glance at him but looked quickly away, not wanting to give him the chance to say anything. Keira noticed the movement, even in the darkness. “I’d say this to you, also. Owaine risked everything to come after you when no one else did,” Keira said quietly. “He did it without orders, without thinking about his own safety, without any reason but his gratitude to your mam and his affection for you. He followed you with nothing protecting him but a belief he might be able to find you.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that. I didn’t give him any reason to think that I might like him the way . . .” She hesitated. “. . . the way he wants me to like him. I don’t. I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair. I’m in love with someone else.”

“I know you are. He knows it, too. And yet it changes nothing for him. He came here knowing that if he managed to bring you back, you’d go to the Saimhóir instead of to him. But to Owaine, that didn’t matter, not if it was what you wanted. That, I think, is a pure love.”

“You seem to know a lot about him,” Meriel answered, the words edged. “You also seem to think that I’m ungrateful.”

Keira didn’t answer. She rose from her crouch, sniffing the air and stretching, looking out into the darkness of the forest rather than at Meriel.

“I
am
grateful to him,” Meriel persisted. “I am. I know I might not even be alive if it weren’t for him.”

More silence. Treoraí’s Heart pulsed against her chest, and she realized what Keira was saying to her. “Oh.” She took as deep a breath as her ribs would allow. “Owaine, would you come here?” Meriel said, though she looked at Keira before turning to him. He squinted, pushed himself away from the stone walls and walked over to them quickly, stopping a few feet in front of her.

“Didn’t it work?” he asked. Concern lined his face. “The way you’re holding onto the staff . . . I can help you back inside . . .”

“Just be quiet a moment,” she told him. She closed the distance between them and opened the cloch again, reaching up to touch his head with her free hand. There was no pain within him, but her true vision went soft and the leaves of the trees around them, once etched sharply against the night sky, became blurred and indistinct. She couldn’t imagine seeing the world so hazy and smeared, much less navigating through a totally unfamiliar landscape that way.
He can barely focus an arm’s length away, yet he came after you. . . .
She sent the cloch’s strength into him, and it pulled her awareness into his. She saw herself as he saw her. She saw
him
. She drew in a breath.

There was nothing hidden in Owaine. She could feel all the hurt and pain he’d accumulated over the years, all the abuse he’d taken at the hands of the other students and even some of the Bráthairs and Siúrs of the Order: the whispered jests he’d overheard, the taunts, the barely-disguised prejudice, the jealousy over Jenna’s and Máister Kirwan’s favor toward him. She felt the cuts she’d put in his soul as well with her curtness. And yet . . . yet there was no anger in him toward her, no resentment, no bitterness. She was him, and she looked at herself and she felt only a forgiveness for every time she’d shunned him or turned away coldly or answered him sharply.

For the first time, she felt regret for the way she’d treated Owaine. For the first time, she looked at him and saw him as he was, and he no longer seemed quite so clumsy or ugly. She found herself comfortable inside him. She felt protected here.

But she couldn’t stay. She let the mage-light fill his eyes and shape them gently. “This is all I can give you for what you did for me, Owaine,” Meriel whispered to him. Owaine gasped.

Meriel released the cloch and stepped back from him. She blinked, the remnants of his poor vision blurring the world around her, feeling his thoughts fade from hers. Owaine, wide-eyed, turned in a circle, giving a cough of amazement and then a long, full laugh as he looked at the world around him.

“I think your mam and the Máister chose the stone’s bearer wisely, Meriel,” Keira said.

Two days later . . .

“Come with me. Quickly!” Keira gestured at Meriel and Owaine from the entrance of the cavern. Then she was gone, hurrying down the slope of the knoll. They followed after her, but she’d vanished among the trees by the time they emerged. One of the crows—they seemed to take turns being with the Bunús Muintir, and though Keira knew all their names, Meriel could never remember them—was waiting for them in the branch of a nearby oak. It cawed and flew off for a short distance, then landed with a hop, cawing at them again. They followed: fly, hop, caw—Meriel hobbling along with the aid of Seancoim’s old staff; Owaine staying at her side. They chased the crow for what seemed to be a stripe of the candle or more, finally half pulling themselves to the top of a hill overlooking the High Road that followed the western side of Lough Lár. Here, the oaks of Doire Coill came nearly to the shore, and the High Road was crowded between trees and water.