“Now you know why Mundy wasn’t happy with the idea of us going out—he’s afraid we’ll be trampled by the urchins,” Owaine said. He wrinkled his nose, shaking his head as he looked around. “There are times when I wish you’d left my sight as it was, Meriel. The smell’s bad enough.” The herd of children turned left and doubled back, passing them again and splashing filthy water over the stones. They were chasing a thin, grime-caked boy, it seemed, and Meriel saw genuine fright on the child’s face as he glanced over his shoulder. The pack caught him a few houses to their right, the boy going down in a flurry of tangled limbs. Fists flew, and they both heard a sharp
crack
and a high shriek of pain.
“Hey!” Owaine shouted. “That’s enough!” He advanced on the fight, waving his arms, and the kids fled, leaving their victim behind. Meriel came over as Owaine crouched down next to the boy. He was sobbing, cradling his left arm, his lips bloodied and one of his eyes already beginning to swell and purple. The child’s ribs showed under the torn léine he wore and his features were misshapen, his ears sticking out through thin, brown and mud-stiff hair. “It’s all right,” Owaine said. “They’re gone. What’s your name?”
The boy sniffed. “Feiad,” he said. “Feiad Sheonin.” He sniffed and blinked away tears.
“Are you badly hurt, Feiad?” Owaine asked, and the boy shook his head, but when he tried to stir and move, he cried out, gasping, holding his left arm tightly.
“Here,” Meriel said to Owaine, crouching beside him. People were watching from the nearby windows, but no one had come out for the boy. “Let me see,” she said, moving Feiad’s hand away from the injured arm. They could see the swelling and the slight angle in the middle of the forearm. Meriel moved her hand gently over it, and under her léine she could feel Treoraí’s Heart respond to the touch.
“The arm’s broken, I’m afraid,” Owaine was saying, and Feiad was crying again. “Where’s your mam? Where do you live?” The boy couldn’t answer him through the sobs.
“He’s too frightened to talk,” Meriel told Owaine. Treoraí’s Heart was pulsing under her hand, the pull of it causing her fingers to close around it, bunching the cloth of her léine as she stroked Feiad’s injured arm. “Shh, Feiad,” she told him softly. “I can help you. I can make it stop hurting.”
“Meriel—” Owaine said sharply, his voice a hiss in her ear. “You shouldn’t. Not here. If word gets out . . .”
She didn’t answer him, looking instead into the boy’s wide, pale green eyes. “The Mother-Creator gave me a Healing Touch,” she told the boy, the words bringing back an image of Sevei’s face to her. “You know the Taisteal?” The boy nodded, sniffing. “I learned it from them,” she told him. “If you lie quietly and let me, I can help. Will you do that?”
Feiad sniffed again. He nodded solemnly.
“Meriel . . .” Owaine was glancing around them. A few people had come out from the houses to watch, sidling closer to them. Meriel closed her hand around the clochmion and the other around Feiad’s arm. The boy gasped in pain and fear, but she had already opened the cloch and the cloch-vision overlaid hers. She could
see
the pain, wild striations of red and orange racing along the nerves, traced in jagged lines from the ugly gray fissure of the break in Feiad’s arm. With it came the torrent of his thoughts: mostly residual fright, but also an underlying, eternal hunger. Images of his family flashed past—his mam; a grizzle-faced and sour older man who might have been his da; his sibs; a sweet and gentle baby’s face laying too still in her crib.
Lheisa
. . . The name came to her, a baby sister who succumbed to childhood illness like too many of those here. The grim weariness of his life weighed down on her, and she forced herself away from the memories, concentrating instead on the pain that made her want to cry with the boy.
Meriel sent the cloch’s energy toward the break, imagining it closing and healing, becoming whole and straight again; in the cloch-vision, the bone reacted, the red-orange flares bending away from Feiad and lancing toward her. Meriel gasped as they touched, releasing Feiad and Treoraí’s Heart with a cry and clutching at her own arm as she fell backward into Owaine. His arms went around her and she let him hold her, gratefully, as the pain slowly receded.
Feiad laughed, dragging the last of the tears away with the back of his hand. He held up his arm, flexing his fingers as the crowd, fascinated by what was happening in the street, came closer. Some of them were among the group who had been chasing the boy a few minutes before. Feiad shouted, a wordless gasp of amazement, hopping to his feet. “Thank you, Healer!” he shouted to Meriel and then ran off, pushing through the first ranks of the people and vanishing. Meriel and Owaine were surrounded now by a few dozen people. None of them spoke to them, but they could hear the murmur of whispered comments:
“She has the Touch; I saw it . . .” “. . . the boy’s arm was broken so the bone nearly went through his skin, and she made it as if it had never happened . . .”
“Come on,” Owaine said to Meriel. She could feel his hand on her arm as she gazed around them, shaking her head. “We have to go. Now.” He led her away, the crowd parting to let them pass. A few followed them for a bit, though most remained behind, talking among themselves, and finally, as they approached one of the market squares to the north, they found themselves alone amidst the crowds of Falcarragh. Owaine bought a few loaves of hard bread and some cheese, and they sat on a stone wall and ate, watching the people pass.
“Mundy won’t like hearing this,” Owaine said finally, tearing off a piece of the loaf and handing it to her.
“I had to, Owaine,” she told him. “I couldn’t look at the boy suffering like that and not do something.”
“I know.” His fingers brushed over hers. “I’m not surprised. It worries me, that’s all.”
She took a bite of the bread—the taste reminding her of the Inish brown bread of home. Even the accents she heard around them had a tinge of the slow, rolling brogue of the Inishlanders. They were close to home: up the long expanse of Falcarragh Bay and across a bit of ocean, and she could be in Dún Kiil once more. “You’re afraid that we’ll be caught, that someone will realize that I have a cloch and tell the gardai.”
Owaine shook his head. She could see a distorted image of herself in the dark mirror of his eyes. “Mundy and the others can worry about that,” he said softly. “I’m worried about
you,
Meriel. I’m afraid because we’re here to kill someone—realistically, that’s the only way we’re going to take Lámh Shábhála from Ó Riain, and I wonder if you truly realize that. If we’re going to take the cloch back, Ó Riain is going to die, and probably others who are around him. For all any of us know, you may have to do some of the killing. Watching you with Feaid just now . . .” He lifted his shoulders. “I saw someone I love and admire, but I didn’t see someone who could kill. I saw a person who would give away a
Cloch Mór because she preferred a cloch that had the gift of healing. I saw someone who was furious with me just a few days ago in Kilmaur because . . .” He looked at his hands and didn’t finish the sentence. He took a breath before looking at her again. “I saw someone whose first worry just now was a child with a broken arm, not the thought that it would be safer for her to do nothing. I see that person and I don’t know that she can do what we intend to do.”
Meriel turned the bread over in her hands, looking down rather than at him. “I know what we’re here for, Owaine,” she said. “I was the one who brought us here.”
“Aye, you did. But there’s a vast difference between knowing and doing. When your mam sent me to the Order, all unexpected, it was such a gift that I was certain that the Mother-Creator had a tremendous fate in store for me. I had this fantasy that I would go to the White Keep and the mages there would all marvel at how quickly I mastered their art, and that I would become the greatest cloudmage of all, that—aye—one day when your mam was too tired to bear the burden any more, she would come back to Inishfeirm and give
me
Lámh Shábhála to keep.”
He had such a solemn expression on his face that Meriel had to laugh. “You didn’t,” she said, and he smiled back at her.
“Aye, I did. I
knew
I was blessed and that there was a great fate in store for me. But I found very quickly that no matter how much I wanted to pretend that I was capable of doing all that, I was no better than an average student and maybe less, and that most of the Bráthairs and Siúrs thought that even the clochmion your mam gave me was too good for the likes of me, who couldn’t even see clearly across a room.”
She leaned over to him and kissed him once on the lips. She pulled back a bare inch, staring into his eyes. “I find you quite heroic enough, Owaine Geraghty. I know what you’re saying. I won’t deny that I’d prefer to do this bloodlessly if at all possible. That’s why I agreed with Doyle’s plan—and I’d point out that if I hadn’t spared Doyle’s life back on Knobtop, we wouldn’t have Edana with us nor this chance. There are times when not killing is the right course. But if it comes to it . . .” She pressed her lips together. “I don’t want to talk about it now,” she told him abruptly, jumping off the wall to her feet. “I suppose we should go back; the others will be worrying.”
She held her hand out to him. “Come on,” she said. “Mam will be needing her andúilleaf soon, and we have a lot to prepare.”
53
Sliabh Bacaghorth
T
HE MOUNTAIN was a steep, heather-wrapped slope. The road from Falcarragh snaked alongside the river that ran in the valley at Sliabh Bacagorth’s feet. The pathway was rarely traveled and poorly maintained—there were few villages here along the craggy eastern coastline of Falcarragh Bay. Most travelers, even those from towns to the north, preferred to continue south a dozen miles to where the mountains gentled somewhat and the roads were better and ran directly to Falcarragh’s gates.
Sitting high up on Sliabh Bacaghorth’s stony flanks, huddled together in the misty rain shaken from low, slate-colored clouds, Meriel could see the gray waters of Falcarragh beyond the point where the mountain’s western ridge fell away suddenly down hundred-foot-high cliffs; at the point where the river in the valley below them met the bay in the foggy distance, there was a small fishing village. The sight of the water made Meriel think of Dhegli, caused the Saimhóir part of her to respond almost as if she felt him near her again. She looked quickly away, turning her attention back to the mountainside. Directly below was a crossroads where the High Road from Falcarragh met the tiny trail that led to the village, and meandered westward to eventually find the High Roads to Glenkille.
In the far distance, as the wan light of the masked sun began to push away the shadows of the night, they could see two riders approaching from the south, from Falcarragh. Owaine gave a sigh of relief. “We have what we asked for,” he said. “They’re alone.”
“And that’s Enean on the left,” Edana said. “No one else sits that regally atop a horse.”
“And the other?” Mundy asked her. “Is that the Regent Guardian?”
Edana shook her head. “I don’t know. It might be, but I can’t tell yet.” She shivered in the cold, pulling her hood closer over her face. “No matter what happens, Enean is not to be permanently harmed. Remember that.”
Mahon grimaced. “In the midst of a battle, that’s going to be hard to guarantee, Bantiarna. We’ll do our best.”
“He is
not
to be harmed,” Edana repeated. “If he is, I swear I’ll turn my cloch against whomever hurt him, no matter what the consequences. He’s my brother, and an innocent pawn in this.”
“We promised Edana to keep Enean safe,” Meriel said, looking at all the others, “and we’ll keep that promise.” The others grumbled their assent, all but Jenna, who huddled silently in her oilskin on the damp ground, staring at the road below. “Let’s get into position.”
They scattered, clambering down the hillside in the shelter of the bracken and pines. Meriel and Owaine helped Jenna to a scree of rocks near the crossroads; Mundy and Doyle scurried into brush bordering the road on the other side. Mahon and Edana stood directly in the road, Mahon holding Edana’s arms as if she were his captive, a knife held casually at her throat. Meriel ducked behind the rock as she heard the slow
clop-clop
of the riders’ horses. “Stop!” Mahon called out loudly. “That’s close enough. We have archers ready, Rí Ard. Come any farther and your sister dies.”
Enean’s deep voice boomed worriedly as he pulled up on the reins. Alongside him, the other man also reined his horse back. “Edana! Are you all right?” Enean called.
“I’m fine, Enean.”
Meriel heard the sound of something heavy hitting the ground, followed by the bright sound of metal. She lifted her head and saw coins scattered from a broken chest. “There,” Enean said. “There’s your ransom. Now let my sister go as you promised.”
“Thank you for coming for me, Enean,” Edana said as Mahon lowered his knife and released her. Meriel saw Edana glance at the hooded figure on the horse next to Enean and give a slight nod. That was Ó Riain, then, his hand at his chest. Meriel knew what the man touched there. They all did. “And thank you, also, Regent Guardian.”
It was the cue they’d been waiting for. With Edana’s identification of the man, Owaine’s hand went to his Cloch Mór, as did Mundy’s and Edana’s.
Three against one, that I could withstand,
Jenna had told them, and Meriel had seen Doyle grimace at the reminder.
But I doubt the Regent Guardian can do that much, not new to Lámh Shábhála, and not if he is surprised.
They attacked the Regent Guardian as one, loosing the power of their clochs and hoping to bear the man down in the first wave. Lightning arced from Owaine’s hand and Blaze; blue tendrils snapped outward from Mundy’s Snarl; the demon wailed as Edana released it to the air. Mahon reversed his knife and threw it spinning toward Ó Riain; Doyle stood with a bow, releasing an arrow and then, rapidly, another.