Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) Read online

  “No.” Jenna raised her hand: the one swirled with the scarred patterns of the mage-lights. The marks were an angry red now, as if infected, and the burns had ravaged the arm above the elbow. “What I need most is nothing any healer can give me.”

  “Lámh Shábhála,” Sevei said well before Jenna’s faint nod.

  “I knew I might be killing myself when I threw it in the sea. But I was willing to accept that rather than let Doyle have it.” She laughed again. “My poor half brother. He’ll never hold it. Never.” Jenna’s hand reached up and found Sevei’s face, stroking it gently. “You could find it,” she said. “Not in this form, but the other.” Her hand, so stiff that it was more claw than hand, tangled in Sevei’s hair, pulling it sharply. “Find it, Sevei. Find it and it might be yours one day, when I’m gone.” Jenna’s voice was a desperate hiss, her eyes wild.

  “Gram, you’re hurting me—”

  “Find it, Sevei,” Jenna spat. “Do you hear me, child?” Then, with a groan, she fell back, her eyes closing and her body hunching into a fetal ball. “Mother, you can’t imagine how this hurts. I can’t bear this. I can’t.”

  “Maybe the Saimhóir have something that can help, some medicine.”

  “The Saimhóir?” Jenna snorted bitterly. “They love to see me like this. It gives them pleasure. They think that this is my proper punishment for Thraisha and Dhegli. They dragged me here so they could watch me suffer and die.”

  Sevei glanced again at Bhralhg, whose whiskers twitched as he grunted something in his own language that she could not understand. “You’re wrong, Gram.”

  Jenna snorted again. “Are you going to talk to me to death, child? Is that what you want?” For a few breaths, the pain washed over her, her face a mask of lines and her eyes closed tightly shut as she huddled under the kelp. Then her eyes opened again as she panted. “You can stay and here and watch me die with the damned seals, or you can help me. You need to choose, Sevei.”

  Sevei started to answer, but a spray of rocks cascaded down from the steep hillside above them, bouncing over the rocks and into the water. Bhralhg was still moaning, his snout lifted upward toward the land, and Sevei followed his gaze.

  Three men stood above them, not fifty strides away, looking down at the little cove where they were huddled: a blue seal, a naked young woman, and the injured Banrion Holder. Two of the men were dressed as gardai; the other was a young tiarna with bright red hair, clad in the green clóca of the Order of Gabair. A stone dangled from a chain around his neck—certainly a Cloch Mór or a clochmion. She recognized him immediately: Padraic Mac Ard.

  He was looking directly down to where Sevei stood. He could not have missed her, staring up at him with her mouth half-open in surprise and fear. She was frozen in place, not certain what to do—she could dive back into the water, become a seal and perhaps escape Padraic, but her gram couldn’t do that. She reached for the clochmion, closing her hand around its comforting facets, but there was no answering dragon call. Yet . . . Holding Dragoncaller, she could feel another power active close by, one that tasted of salt and water . . .

  Through the noise of the surf, she could hear one of the gardai with Padraic talking. “. . . all day walking around this Mother-cursed island and we’re seeing nothing but rocks, grass, birds, and sheep. Not to complain, but this cold and damp is hard on my bones.”

  “You’re just getting old, soft, and tired,” the other garda said. “Why, I don’t think—”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Padraic said. “Neither one of you is out here to think.” The younger garda snapped his mouth shut. She could see the older one roll his eyes at his companion behind Padraic’s back. “We’re here to look for the Mad Holder and Bantiarna Geraghty, either them or Saimhóir, and unless you idiots want to be the next ones that dangerous old bitch kills, I’d suggest you use your eyes more than your mouths.”

  All the time he was talking, Padraic’s gaze was sweeping back and forth over the beach below. Sevei saw his regard pass directly over her twice and yet he said nothing, gave no indication that he saw her at all. She could hear Bhralhg moaning softly behind her, large and conspicuous on the rocks, and it was impossible that they did not see or hear him.

  Yet they did not. “Nothing there,” Padraic said after a few moments. “All right—we’ll finish up this island, then move on to the next one. We can eat when we get back to the ship. Come on . . .”

  Sevei watched them walk away, vanishing quickly over the brim of the hillside. The low keening from Bhralhg stopped. “You did that,” she said to him. He could not have understood her words, but the amazement on her face communicated enough. He gave the toss of the head that she knew was a Saimhóir nod. Jenna seemed to have lapsed into unconsciousness or uneasy sleep. Sevei shivered, the wind and spray whipping around her. With the touch of the water, she let herself slip back into Saimhóir form and waddled over to Bhralhg. “Thank you,” she told him when their bodies touched.

  His voice came to her head, amused. “I know what the Holder thinks of me. Do you think the same?”

  “No.” She watched Jenna, shivering in her sleep and whimpering like a child. “Can you help her, with the power that you have?”

  Bhralhg gave a shake of his broad head. “I’ve done what I can. I can’t give her what she is missing.”

  Sevei sighed. “I need to go to where the ships—the wooden islands that move—were when you found us. Can you take me there?”

  His large eyes regarded her thoughtfully. “I can,” he said.

  The part of her that was Saimhóir was comfortable out here, but the human part felt lost and frail. The sea was huge, featureless and eternally shifting, and the spot to which Bhralhg guided her could have been anywhere. Even the islands that she glimpsed as they bobbed up and down in the long, low swells were no help; she hadn’t been able to see them very well in the storm that night. Her body, even in seal form, ached where the wounds were still healing, and she wondered whether she would have the strength to search and still make it back to shore. She let the next wave take her sideways until her body brushed Bhralhg’s fur. “You’re certain?” she thought to him, and she heard laughter in her head overlaid with the bark of a seal.

  “This is where we found you,” he answered with a firm confidence. “And I know what you’re looking for. You won’t find it.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked him suspiciously.

  Bhralhg swam away for a moment, then returned. His voice came to her as they touched. “I know how it is with Bradán an Chumhacht,” he said. “You don’t always choose the power. Often—most often—it chooses you. When Challa died and gave up Bradán an Chumhacht, there were others who were closer to it as it came from her mouth. They chased the Great Salmon, many of Challa’s milk-sons and -daughters, all of them ready to swallow and take it in. But Bradán an Chumhacht swam to me and away from them, and all I had to do was open my mouth. It wanted me, for reasons I don’t know. I think it may be the same for you stone-walkers and Lámh Shábhála. The cloch will find whom it wants, now that it is free.”

  “It’s not free,” Sevei insisted. “Gram is still alive and it belongs to her. She needs it.”

  “She needs it,” Bhralhg agreed. “But does Lámh Shábhála still need her?”

  Sevei felt herself shiver at that. She rolled away from him so she couldn’t hear his voice anymore. He grunted something at her in the Saimhóir tongue; she took a long breath and dove.

  The water quickly turned dark as she descended, and she could feel the pressure flatten her body and push against her ears. Twenty feet down, she could barely feel the pull of the waves. Instead, she could taste a salty current washing in from the west, warmer than the surface water and laden with clouds of tiny plankton. The bottom here, another twenty feet down, was rocky with stands of kelp waving lazily back and forth like trees in a fitful wind. Sevei despaired, seeing that. The stone on its necklace could be anywhere here. It could be right under her and she wouldn’t see it; the
chain could have been caught in the strands of kelp above or the stone might have drifted far away in the strong currents. It could have been swallowed by some sea creature. Bhralhg could be mistaken about the location and Lámh Shábhála might be laying on the bottom a half-stripe’s swim from here. The sea floor was as vast as an unexplored continent, and Sevei needed to find one singular pebble on it. It was an impossible task.

  She noticed that Bhralhg stayed on the surface, waiting for her. When she looked up, she could his dark form as a shadow on the bright top of the water.

  She searched, with increasing pessimism, until her need to breathe drove her to the surface again. Bhralhg came over to her as she panted. “You won’t find it, Sevei. You’ve done what you needed to do, and you’ve seen how futile it is. Let Lámh Shábhála find who it wants. We should return to the dry stones so you can rest in your own form.”

  “I can’t. Not until I find the cloch.”

  The sun sparked blue on his wet fur. “Don’t you think that if Lámh Shábhála wished to stay with the First Holder that it wouldn’t have allowed her to throw it away so easily, or that it would have been there for her when she dove after it?”

  Sevei hesitated, Bhralhg’s words feeding the unease inside her. She swam a few strokes away from him and took several quick breaths, filling her lungs, and dove again. She returned to the sea floor, searching in an ever-widening circle among the crannies of the rocks and the sandy floor under them until she could stay down no longer. Her injured body trembled with the threat to return to human form, but she sought the air once more, then again returned to the calm infinity underneath.

  And this time she found the Uaigneas. The ship was canted over on its side, its masts broken, the tattered sails shredded and fluttering in the currents. Sevei swam over a field of debris scattered on the ocean floor near the ship: trunks, dishes from the galley, ropes, pulleys, an ax, furniture she recognized from the small passenger chamber in the ship. . . .

  No stone on a bright golden chain. No Lámh Shábhála.

  She swam closer, feeling the remembered terror welling up inside her. Much of the decking was charred as if a fierce fire had burned there before it sank, and as she approached, she could see worse: bodies, arms outstretched as if waving to her. The sea creatures had already come to dine on the feast sent down from above: starfish, crabs, lobsters, a bright welter of fish. The scavenger fish fled at the sight of her seal form. She swam along what had once been the ship’s deck. There, that was the railing where Gram had stood as she threw Lámh Shábhála into the sea. That body there, in clothing she recognized, must be the captain. She veered away, not wanting to see him closely.

  And there . . .

  ... there . . .

  It was the white clóca first, and the shape of his head, turned in profile to her and ghostly against the burned timbers behind him.

  Dillon. Her snouted mouth opened with his name: a plea, a prayer, a curse.

  His leg was snared in a coil of rope and his left hand gripped the railing that was now the top of the wreckage as if he’d been trying to climb up to the surface as the ship heeled over as it sank. His body was bloated, his hair drifted like smoke, his mouth was open in a final water-stoppered shout; as she stared, a tiny fish darted out from the tooth-lined cavern. The full shock rippled through her body then. She felt her awareness shifting, felt the hammer blow of seeing Dillon start to send her body back to its human form. She wanted to scream, wanted to wail, wanted to do anything to stop the pain that threatened to tear her open from the inside.

  Something, someone struck her hard from underneath, pushing her, nudging her upward, and she realized that Bhralhg was there, guiding her up toward the surface and away from the wreckage of the ship. She reached down for Dillon, and the hand that stretched out before her eyes was furred like a Saimhóir but had her own fingers. Then, in a rush, they broke the surface of the water and Sevei gasped at the cold bite of the air. She struggled, trying to dive back underneath the surging waves, but Bhralhg’s head butted against her, driving her back up.

  “You must stop.” Bhralhg’s body was warm against the freezing cold of the water. “If you change out here, you will die. There is nothing you can do for those down there. You must stay in Saimhóir form.” His voice was sympathetic and understanding. She felt a prickling of the fur that encased her and she knew he had loosed some of the energy of Bradán an Chumhacht. Against her own will, she felt herself calming. Seeing Dillon seemed somehow distant and long ago . . . She fought against the imposed tranquillity.

  “Why?” she railed at him, though now she could hold back the change that threatened her. “At least I’d join the rest of my family with the Mother. We’d all be there together: Kayne, Gram, my mam, my da . . .”

  “Not your da. Your da died long cycles ago.”

  The waves lifted them, dropped them again. His words banished the horrible image of Dillon, replacing it with confusion and uncertainty. Despite the serenity he’d forced on her, she felt as if her entire world had shifted. “What do you mean? I felt the attack, I felt Kayne’s despair. Da was there; I could feel him through Kayne.”

  “You feel those of your blood, Sevei. You dream of them.”

  “Aye,” Sevei admitted. “But I never told you that.”

  “Bradán an Chumhacht knows,” he answered. “You dream of your mam and of your brother Kayne with whom you shared a womb. You see them the most, and sometimes you can even glimpse your gram and your other brothers and sisters. But the one you call your da—do you ever dream of him?”

  Sevei gave a wriggle of her head. “No.”

  “Are there ever Saimhóir in your dreams?”

  She remembered the times that images of the Saimhóir drifted through the images in her head. “Aye, but . . .”

  Bhralhg gave her no chance to continue. She realized what he was going to say then, before he spoke the words and she shook her head as if she could stop them with the denial. “Your mam was a changeling like you. Meriel swam with Dhegli, who carried Bradán an Chumhacht before me and before Challa. And Dhegli, unlike Challa and me, was also a changeling.” He hesitated as a wave pushed them momentarily apart. “Like you,” he finished when he swam back to her. “Can your brother change, Sevei? Does the WaterMother call to him? The two of you are really so different, so unlike each other . . .”

  Even Bradán an Chumhacht couldn’t hold back the turmoil in her mind at the implications. Again she struggled to retain the shape of a Saimhóir. She swam away from Bhralhg.

  “No,” she said.

  She heard the word come from her mouth as a seal’s grunt.

  16

  The Voice of Vengeance

  LIAM O’Blathmhaic wasn’t what Kayne had expected in a clan-laird. He seemed no more well off than O Leathlobhair: his house was in a state of eternal disrepair, the stone fences around his pastureland half-falling down the steep slopes on which they were set. Sheep stared placidly at them as they approached, and Laird O’Blath mhaic came from his house bearing a large cudgel that he waved at O Leathlobhair. A black-and-white herding dog which looked to be almost as old as O’Blathmhaic himself growled at them from his side.

  “What is it now, O Leathlobhair, you crazy old man?” the laird shouted down at them. “I told you the last time: the ewe was more than enough in payment for the trampling of your field and that settles it between you and young Odhougnal. That was my judgment and I’ve not changed my mind. I don’t care who you bring to argue with me . . .”

  The tirade broke off in mid-sentence as Laird O’Blath mhaic stopped and squinted down the worn dirt path up which Kayne and O Leathlobhair were laboring. He brought the cudgel down and leaned against it as a cane. The dog sat. “The red-hair with you is no one I know. I see blood on his fine clothes, and he has a warrior’s bearing.”

  “I am Kayne Geraghty, son of Meriel MacEagan and Owaine Geraghty,” Kayne answered, giving his name. Behind him, O Leathlobhair hissed quietly: “Careful, boy . . .�
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  “I saw a great fire sending smoke from up on the Narrows earlier today, and crows gathering there,” O’Blathmhaic said, nodding. “They were feasting on your companions, I would guess, from what I see in front of me.”

  Kayne grimaced. An image came to him: a huge black bird sitting on his da’s chest, the beak open as it lowered its head to peck at his open eyes . . . He forced the thought away. “Aye, Laird O’Blathmhaic,” he said. “We were cowardly attacked as we were riding in peace back to Dún Laoghaire from the wars in Céile Mhór. My da was the commander.”

  “And your attackers?” His massive, ancient face folded into a bearded scowl. “If you’re accusing Fingerlanders, then you’d better be quicker with that sword than you look, boy. Old I may be, but my stick here has beaten the heads of stronger men than you, even if they don’t bear fancy names and titles.”

  Kayne drew himself up at the insult and threat, but O Leathlobhair touched his shoulder and he held his temper with an effort. “The gardai wore red and white, Laird. There were Riocha from Dathúil with them, and at least one Cloch Mór.”

  O’Blathmhaic spat at that, sending a massive globule splashing against the stones of the path. “Come inside,” he grunted. “I’ll hear more.”

  A stripe later, Kayne had finished relating his tale, his throat eased somewhat by a tankard of bitter dark ale O’Blathmhaic set in front of him. The steep-hilled landscape outside the window was cloaked in night’s shadow by that time, and the peat fire in the hearth filled the small dwelling with its ruddy heat. The dog slumbered, snoring audibly, under the table. O’Blathmhaic’s pudgy fingers prowled his snarled and braided gray beard; his eyes glinted in the deep hollows of their sockets. In close proximity, the man smelled of peat and dirt and sheep, and the few teeth he had left were brown and tilted in the bed of his gums. “My companions and I need your help, Laird,” Kayne finished, hating to say the words, hating the way the man seemed to leer at him with the statement. Liam O’Blathmhaic was the epitome of the tuathánach, the class of person that Kayne had always ignored when he rode past their hovels, had turned his head away at the sight and smell of them. Like most Riocha, he’d felt himself better than these common creatures; in truth, looking around the filth that this man called home, he still felt himself better. He longed for the keep at Dún Laoghaire: for its spacious chambers, its bright hangings and hordes of servants, its light and glory and majesty.