Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (77 page)

“I
have
to, Owaine. I must. I love you, Owaine. That hasn’t changed.”

At last, his hand dropped away. She leaned toward him, his arms going around her. The kiss was fierce and long, and when he released her, he touched her lips with his hand. “Stay safe, Meriel,” he said. “I hope . . .” He stopped. “Go on with you, then,” he finished.

“I do love you, Owaine.”

“I know. And I you. I found you when Doyle snatched you from Inishfeirm; I suppose I can find you again in Falcarragh.” He gave her a quick, lopsided grin that faded as quickly as it had come. He nodded to Mahon and Mundy. “Let’s go,” he said, and dug his heels into the sides of his horse, the other two following close behind. Meriel watched them go, then turned her own horse’s head to the west and the salt water.

“Go!” she cried to the mare.

Dalhmalli was a cluster of half a dozen cottages huddled on a rocky shore with the cliff of Bacaghorth looming over them. The residents were fisherfolk and superstitious, since after all Sliabh Bacaghorth was a haunted place and Falcarragh Bay itself was home to strange fogs and hidden creatures. Today was a day for the truly superstitious, with the gloomy rain and mist and with the strange thunders booming through the valley along the slopes of Bacaghorth and bright, colorful, and impossible colors flickering under the clouds. So when a rider came galloping along the road from the east, not a stripe later than the odd lights, those of Dalhmalli stayed inside, watching fearfully from their small shuttered windows under the thatched roofs as the apparition appeared. They were expecting a fire-breathing stallion, perhaps, ridden by a skeletal soldier—such as some had said haunted the crossroads not far from here. Or perhaps it might be the ghost of old Rowan Beirne himself, wailing for the great cloch na thintrí he’d lost to the Inish.

But the horse was just a plain brown mare, and the rider only a young woman, though what happened afterward would make them wonder if she had not been something mythical herself.

Meriel drew the mare up at the water’s edge. A single, sagging wharf ran out toward the water with a few small boats tied to its gray, bowed planks. Here, the smell of fresh rain mingled with the strong odor of brine and fish. The pull she had felt back at the crossroads had grown stronger as she came nearer the water and now it sang in her head, driving out nearly everything else. She knew the villagers were watching; she didn’t care.

On the rocks nearby, a half dozen blue-black seals pointed their whiskered snouts and bright, dark eyes at her, and on the wharf itself . . . A naked man stood there, strangely comfortable in his nudity and the cold: his hair slicked with rain and seawater, his body marked with swirling lines of scars like those on her mam’s arm. Seeing him both pleased and frightened her. She’d told herself that the old affection for him was gone, that she felt nothing for Dhegli since he’d left her at Lough Lár, that what she’d found with Owaine had driven all memory and traces of it away, burned it away with a new fire and passion . . .

. . . but it wasn’t true. Looking at him, she knew. She knew that what Dhegli had told her once was indeed possible—she could feel love for more than one person. The realization was freighted with guilt and sadness. “Hello, Dhegli,” Meriel said. “I’d hoped you’d be here.” She touched her forehead. “I felt you.”

He smiled at her and spoke, though the words were the sounds of a seal. He padded forward, his footsteps quiet on the slick weathered boards. He took her hand; its warmth surprised her. Its softness pleased her. “Hello, Meriel,” he said, his voice sounding in her head with the touch. “I saw you, too, in my dreams. I
had
to come.”

“My mam . . . Jenna . . . The Holder . . .”

“I know. We felt the power change suddenly, to something wild and dangerous.”

“I’m so scared for her, Dhegli.” Her heart pounded in her chest, remembering Jenna’s wild manic gaze and the awful ease and strength with which she’d wielded Lámh Shábhála. One of the seals on the rocks gave a coughing bark, drawing Meriel’s attention. She recognized the seal: the one called Challa. “She came with you.” Meriel couldn’t keep a slight stress from the first word.

One corner of his lips turned up, dimpling his stubbled cheek. “She told me not to come, but, aye, she followed and we brought the others—several of the Saimhóir who have swallowed the smaller Bradán, the fishes that hold the power of the sky-energy. They have pledged to help me, as we helped your mam once before. I don’t know what we can do or if it will save her, but we’ll try.”

“Why?” Meriel asked. “Why do you do this for me?” Dhegli laughed at her. He leaned down, his face close to hers. “You know why.” He bent his head to hers. Meriel trembled, but she didn’t move away, not until his lips touched hers. With a gasp, she leaned away. He didn’t move, and finally she brought her head back and kissed him. She tried to pretend it was Owaine and couldn’t. She wept, not knowing why.

“Come swim with me, Meriel,” he whispered. “Let us have one last time together.”

Meriel stepped away from his embrace. She could feel the eyes of the village on them, watching. Slowly, she lifted her clóca and léine above her head and let them fall to the wharf. She stood naked except for Treoraí’s Heart.

She walked with Dhegli to the wharf’s edge. She felt the change beginning even as she dove with him into the water.

They would say in later years that the mage-lights had never shone brighter or more intensely than they did that night. The first rippling bands of pale blue and green began to appear not long after the sun had set. The rain had passed, finally, and the western sky was a deep aquamarine in which the first few stars swam. The mage-lights came from the north, as they always did, swaying and dancing their way to the zenith as the colors deepened and became more varied, so luminous that they put to shame the East Light, the beacon for ships out on its island in the bay. No ship would need the beacons that night to guide the way into Falcarragh Harbor: the mage-lights rivaled the day.

They seemed to hover over the city where so many Clochs Mór had gathered. The guards at North Gate were particularly alert already: the Rí Ard, the Regent Guardian, and a few dozen attending gardai had ridden out from there the night before and were expected back at any time. The curling fire of the mage-lights began to snake down toward the waiting clochs, but the guards atop the gate towers could see another brightness toward the north, like a great fire burning. It seemed to flicker like red lightning, growing closer. “It’s the Regent Guardian,” one of the gardai speculated. “Lámh Shábhála, it draws the mage-lights more than any other cloch, I’ve heard . . .”

He and his companions peered down along the High Road outside the New Wall, winding at the foot of the hills that bordered the water. The light crept closer, illuminating the hillsides as if some giant were walking there and bearing an immense lantern. They could see the mage-lights spiraling down like a waterspout made of moonlight and jewels to someone hidden just past the first bend. They straightened, expecting to see the Rí Ard and his retinue. But there was only the sound of a lone horse and rider, galloping madly toward the city in a blaze of storm-light, the mage-lights a raging tornado behind. “Close the gates!” the garda shouted in sudden, tardy alarm. “Send a runner to the Rí . . .” but it was already too late.

They heard a faint shout from the rider. “Mother-Creator, who is that?” someone asked in a marveling, fearful voice. “It’s not the Regent—” and a furious streak of light shot from the rider’s upraised hand toward the gates. It slammed into the New Wall with a boom and crash; the great stones, heavier than any ten men could lift, were flung about like a handful of pebbles. The garda felt the platform under him give way as the towers flanking the gates toppled, and he screamed as he fell the forty feet to the flagstones below, a scream that was lost in the din of the collapse, in the dust of the explosion, in the great shadow of stones that entombed him a moment later.

The rider laughed, a pale sound in the midst of the destruction that was heard only by the terrified people in the hovels outside the walls. Mage-lights rushed back down into Lámh Shábhála, filling it to bursting again; the scars on the Holder’s arm seeming to glow as if she were illuminated from inside. She sent a burst of hurricane wind toward the rubble of the gate, sending rock and stone scattering and clearing a path for her to ride through.

“I’ve come!” she shouted to the city, her voice amplified by the mage-power she bore. “Hear me, Riocha! You stole Lámh Shábhála from me; you would have bloodied my land with the bodies of my people. But your bane and your destruction have come to you! It comes
now!
”

She urged her steed forward, wide-eyed and snorting with its own terror, held only by the power of the woman who rode it.

The Mad Holder rode into Falcarragh and it trembled before her.

O
WAINE, Mundy, and Mahon had caught up with Doyle and Edana soon after they’d left Sliabh Bacaghorth. The two had stopped perhaps a mile away, and Owaine pulled up his own horse at the sight that transfixed them. Past a bend in the road and a copse of trees there was a boggy meadow, but the heath there had been burned, curling wisps of smoke still rising from the wet ground. Scattered alongside the road were the corpses of two hands or more of gardai and their horses, scattered as if they’d been picked up and smashed again into the ground. Most were charred black beyond recognition; on those few who were not, they could see clócas in the unrelieved dark gray of Dún Laoghaire—the Rí Ard’s color: Enean’s gardai, then, brought with him as an escort from Falcarragh and kept back while he and
Ó
Riain had gone on to Sliabh Bacaghorth.

Owaine didn’t need to ask what had happened to them. He knew who had done this.

Leaving the scene of the carnage, they’d ridden together toward Falcarragh in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. “Where’s Meriel?” had been Edana’s only question, and she only nodded at Owaine’s answer: “She’s gone back to the city her own way.”

Night began to fall as they came near Falcarragh, still without any sign of Jenna. They were close to North Gate; they could already see the East Light, out in the Bay. The mage-lights appeared, early and strong, and they halted for a moment to lift their own emptied Clochs Mór to the sky. Owaine, Mundy, and Edana all felt it, then, as their clochs slipped into the web of energy : Lámh Shábhála, feeding at the mage-lights, as swirling and dark and all-consuming as a maelstrom of the sea. In Owaine’s mind, it was an awful vision, a horror, and he gasped at the sight of it. “What has she done?” he asked as he heard Mundy gasp.

The Máister’s eyes were wide. “She calls the lights and pulls them in, then throws out their power again, only to take in more, over and over again.”

A flash and boom came then, not far away and in the direction of the city gates, and they felt a simultaneous tug at their clochs. “Ride!” Owaine called to them. “It’s begun.”