Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) Read online

  “Meriel,” she said, glancing at the clock-candle on the fireplace mantel, the white wax marked with regular lines of red. “I sent for you over a stripe ago.”

  “Sorry, Mam,” Meriel answered. “I’d had Iníon Nainsi take me down to the harbor, and we came back as soon as the page found us.”

  That was a lie. In truth, Meriel had been with Lucan O Dálaigh behind the rocks at the edge of the harbor, with Nainsi acting as lookout in case someone came near. Lucan was two years older than Meriel and the youngest son of Barra O Dálaigh, a tiarna under Meriel’s da.

  She and Lucan had started a secret flirtation—at least Meriel hoped it was secret—while she’d been visiting her da in Dún Madadh last summer. The first night there, she’d danced with him at the Festival of Méitha; the quiet romance had blossomed during long, warm days, fueled by too-rare meetings. When Lucan had been sent to Dun Kiil to serve at the keep only a few days after Meriel herself had returned, she’d thought that the Mother-Creator Herself had blessed them. The relationship had already lasted longer than any of her past infatuations; she had dared, once or twice, to imagine that it might even go further. For now, though, there were only stolen moments in the corridors of the keep and precious minutes when they could both find excuses to be away and alone together. She could still feel the touch of Lucan’s mouth on hers; she wondered that her mam could not see the kisses, engraved in burning heat on her lips.

  Jenna MacEagan seemed to possess that sorcery: she had a strange knack of knowing when Meriel was lying and for seeing things that Meriel thought hidden. Her mam was still frowning, and Meriel rubbed unconsciously at her lips with the back of her hand. “Besides, Mam,” Meriel added, “there’s that Taisteal clan that has set up down by the harbor, and they hardly ever come here and I wanted to see what they had to buy. . . .”

  Her mam only nodded abstractedly and without anger, as if her mind were elsewhere. Jenna tucked strands of coal-black hair (with a few, first strands of silver at the temples) behind her ear and adjusted the golden torc around her neck: the torc of the Banrion. On the brocaded clóca she wore, a chain glittered, a cage of silver wire on it holding a stone of pale green, shot with lines of white: Lámh Shábhála, the first and most powerful of the clochs na thintrí—the mage-stones. Despite its reputed power, the stone had always seemed rather plain and ordinary to Meriel.

  In the shadows of the dimly lit room, motion snagged Meriel’s gaze as a man moved behind the serving table to her right. He was dressed in a plain white clóca and léine. He was older, perhaps the same age as her mam, with long blond hair fading now to gray, his skull shiny-bald from eyebrows to nearly the crown of his head. His beard, though, was strangely dark and liberally spattered with white hairs; under it, a jewel the green-blue of a shallow sea glittered in a cage of silver and gold, suspended from a chain around his neck. The gem was far more impressive to look at than the one around her mam’s neck. Jenna knew what that stone was, too, or at least she could guess at it: a Cloch Mór, one of the thirty major mage-stones. White raiment, the cloch na thintrí around his neck: the man was a cloudmage of the Order of Inishfeirm.

  Seeing him in this room, she had a sudden gnawing suspicion as to why he was here and why she’d been summoned. Her stomach burned with the thought, roiling. You wouldn’t do this to me, Mam, she wanted to cry out, all at once. Her mam saw Meriel’s attention on the stranger. “Meriel, this is Máister Mundy Kirwan,” she said, “head of the Order of Inishfeirm.”

  The man’s eyes were the blue of glacial ice, though there was a gentleness in the folds that crinkled around them as he smiled at her. “You probably don’t remember me, Bantiarna MacEagan,” he said, “but we’ve met before, three or four times. The first time, you’d been born no more than a week before; the last time I was in Dún Kiil, you were seven or perhaps eight summers old. You’ve . . . grown up much since then.” He glanced over to Meriel’s mam, whose lips were set in the neutral near-frown she wore whenever she was talking with the Riocha—those of royal blood—who swarmed around Dún Kiil like flies around a dead storm deer. “She’s ready to go?”

  The burning in Meriel’s stomach went to flame. “Ready to go?” Meriel asked, looking from one to the other. “To go? Mam, please, you can’t mean that . . .”

  Meriel saw confusion and embarrassment cross the Máister’s face, and his hands lifted in apology. “Jenna, I’m sorry. I thought you’d already told her—”

  Jenna . . . With the casual use of her mam’s name, Meriel realized how well the Máister must know her. There were very few people on Inish Thuaidh who could address her so familiarly. Jenna MacEagan was “Banrion MaEagan” or at the least “First Holder.” The only one she had heard call her mam “Jenna” had been Da or old Aithne MacBrádaigh, whose late husband had been the Rí before Meriel’s mam had become Banrion.

  “Told me what?” Meriel asked.

  Her mam’s lips tightened, the lines on her forehead grew deeper. Jenna’s right hand, covered with the patterned white lines of old scars that echoed the lines of the mage-lights, brushed the silver cage of Lámh Shábhála and dropped again.

  “I meant to tell her,” Jenna said, speaking more to the Máister than to Meriel. “But she was away with Kyle all the summer and I’ve been otherwise occupied since then, as you know. . . .” She stopped. Took a long breath. Gold-brown eyes caught Meriel’s gaze. Meriel knew what she was going to say before she spoke, confirming the apprehension she’d felt ever since she saw the Máister in the room. “You’re going with Mundy—Maister Kirwan—to Inishfeirm, Meriel. I studied there, too, after I became First Holder—”

  “No.” Meriel spat out the word, interrupting her mam. Her head shook, her long and rather unruly strands of curly red hair swaying with the motion. She said it more loudly. “No! I’m not going, Mam. I’m not interested in being a cloudmage.”

  “You need this schooling, Meriel,” Jenna answered. “It’s vital, for your own well-being.”

  “Do you hate me that much, Mam?” Meriel railed back. “Have you run out of cages to put me in or places to send me so you don’t have to deal with me? Am I in your way that much?”

  Bright spots of color flared high on her mam’s cheeks and Meriel thought she was going to spiral into one of her rages, but Máister Kirwan cleared his throat and they both looked at him. “Meriel, I remember your mam telling old Máister Cléurach fourteen years ago, in nearly the same tone, that she had absolutely no interest in anything he could teach her,” Máister Kirwan said, a chuckle of subdued amusement in his voice. “The poor man damned near died of apoplexy right there and then.” He did laugh then, a low rumble like soft thunder. “But your mam did study despite her protest, if somewhat grudgingly, and she learned. You should be an even better student: you have the gift from your mam’s side, and . . .” He paused, glancing at Jenna strangely. “. . . as strong a one from your da’s.”

  Her mam’s cheeks colored again, and Meriel wondered why the man would say that, in such an odd tone. Aye, her da also held a Cloch Mór, but he always said that it was only because his wife was the First Holder and he never seemed to enjoy talking about the times he’d used it. Jenna, on the other hand, was certainly snared in magic. Meriel had heard the tales of the Filleadh, the “Coming Back” of the mage-stones for which her mam had supposedly been responsible.

  Meriel had never been able to escape the history of her mam. In fact, her mam’s past seemed to surround Meriel everywhere she went, and people delighted in telling her again all the tales she’d heard too many times before. She heard them in long ballads sung by the Song-masters in the Weeping Hall: the Lay of Jenna Aoire and its endless verses. Or she heard them in the whispered tales from the succession of maidservants who had watched her through her childhood, or even from her current attendant Nainsi. “Oh, your mam the Banrion,” they’d say with trembling voices, “why, you wouldn’t believe what she did when she was but a young woman herself. She was chased all the way to Inish Thuaidh by the
gardai of the Rí Ard and barely escaped with her life. . . .” Or it would be the flattering tongues of the Riocha she met, pressing around her in sycophantic delight. “Aye, I was there at Dun Kiil with the Banrion when she defeated the armies of the Tuatha. . . .”

  The stories and songs, some of them, were so far-fetched that they seemed more myth and legend than truth, impossible to attribute to the flesh-and-blood woman she called Mam: the powerful Banrion who united the contentious clans of Inish Thuaidh; the fierce Hero of Dún Kiil; the great First Holder. Meriel knew the last was true, at least: the mage-lights called Jenna nearly every night and Jenna went out to commune with them and let them wrap their silver-and-green tendrils around her.

  Meriel also remembered the feel of her mam’s right arm like ice against her skin, and how the fingers curled into a stiff claw. She heard her mam cry out in pain some nights, cradling that arm to herself and moaning.

  Meriel had cried at nights as well over the years, wishing that her mam could simply be her mam and not some distant story.

  “The Máister’s right,” Jenna said. “Meriel, you’re seventeen. You need to start learning your way in life.” She touched the stone around her neck; as she did, the sleeve of her líene fell to her elbow, displaying the scars that marred the flesh from hand to shoulder. “Someday, this may be yours to hold.”

  “I don’t want it, Mam,” Meriel said. “I’ve told you that a dozen times before. But I don’t expect you to suddenly start listening to what I want now.”

  Jenna drew in her breath with an audible hiss, and Meriel saw small muscles twitch along her mam’s jaw. She knew that the argument was lost before it was begun. Mam, she wanted to cry, every time I try to make my own life, you destroy it. You can’t take me away from here, away from Lucan, away from the only friends I have, away from my da, away from everything familiar and everything I have right now. You can’t send me to a miserable flea speck of an island stinking of fish and seals. That isn’t the life I want. Why do you hate me so much?

  She knew what her mam would say—Jenna had said it to her daughter many times over the years, so often that the actual words had lost any meaning they’d once had. It was ritual. “We rarely get what we want from life, Meriel. We have to take what the Mother-Creator gives us. I’m doing this to make you stronger.”

  I don’t need to be strong, I need you to act like you love me, Meriel ached to retort. It’s not the Mother-Creator doing this. It’s you. No one else.

  But she bit her lip, trying not to cry in front of them.

  “You’re going, Meriel,” Jenna said, her voice as implacable as the stone walls around them. “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Da, you can’t let Mam do this!” Meriel said desperately.

  A slow, somewhat sad smile drifted over her da’s features. His attendant Alby, who somehow always seemed to be in the same room as her da, sniffed as if in reply to Meriel’s plea as he poured water for tea. Kyle MacEagan’s chambers in Dún Kiil Keep were unconnected to his wife’s, and they seemed more comfortable and warm to Meriel. “Come here, my lamb,” her da said, opening his arms. She leaned into his embrace, as soft as his features. Kyle was a short man—Meriel’s head was at a level with his—and plump. Meriel sometimes wondered how the man could be her da—she seemed to have inherited everything from her mam, not him. She could also love him as she couldn’t seem to love her mam. He was also affectionate with her, always willing to be interested in anything she was interested in, always able to let her be part of his life.

  Her mam would never do that. Jenna was the First Holder before anything else, and Lámh Shábhála was the more demanding child.

  Everything about Kyle MacEagan was relaxed and gentle: his movements, his breath, his voice. The only hardness to him was the Cloch Mór, Firerock, that he wore around his neck. He kissed Meriel’s forehead as if she were still a child. “Your mam has only your welfare at heart,” he whispered to her as if he’d guessed her thoughts. “I know you don’t feel that way sometimes, but it’s true. It’s always been true.”

  She pulled back from him; his arms dropped back quietly and unresistingly. “You can’t be taking her side in this, Da. She wants to send me to Inishfeirm—that miserable, sheep-infested island, where I’ll be surrounded by old cloudmages and all the useless third sons and second daughters of the Riocha that have been sent to them.”

  “Ah,” Kyle said. His eyes twinkled. “So you’re too good for them?”

  “Da, that’s not what I mean,” she said in exasperation. His eyebrows raised, but he didn’t answer. “It’s not. Why should I have to go to Inishfeirm with the Máister? I should be here, where I can learn to be a bantiarna and serve on the Comhairle and maybe even one day be the Banrion.”

  “Ah, so you’ve decided to be Banrion now,” Kyle said, and Meriel heard Alby chuckle quietly across the room. Meriel felt her cheeks go hot, but before she could say anything, her da shook his head. “Meriel, maybe one day that burden—and it’s a burden, my lamb; if you believe nothing else, you should believe that—will come to you. If it does, aye, you’ll need to know much more than you do now. You’ll need to know things that only Máister Kirwan can teach you.”

  Meriel resisted the temptation to stamp her foot on the stone flags of the room. “You’re going to let her send me away? Why does she hate me so much?”

  “Meriel . . .” Kyle sighed and took the mug of tea that Alby offered him. Meriel shook her head at the mug the man proffered to her. Alby nodded, though she thought she saw a disapproving half scowl on his face, and moved back to the recesses of the chamber. Her da sipped at the tea. “Your mam loves you, as I do, even if you don’t want to believe that. If you’re going to truly be Bantiarna MacEagan and be on the Comhairle, much less be Banrion, then you’re also going to need to learn that sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t do what you want, but rather what you have to do. Things have changed recently, and so this you have to do.”

  “Why?”

  He lifted the mug again. His eyes closed as he sipped. They stayed closed as he spoke. “It’s for your own safety.”

  Meriel glared at him. “That’s what Mam said. I didn’t believe her either.”

  Kyle glanced across the room to where Alby stood. She thought she saw him shake his head at the man. He went to the window of the chamber and set the mug down on the sill. When he turned back, his face was more solemn than Meriel ever remembered seeing it. “Jenna—your mam—asked me not to tell you this. But I will. You’ve been directly threatened, Meriel. Your uncle Doyle Mac Ard . . . he sent a message to your mam. That’s why we want you to go to Inishfeirm: so you’ll not only have cloudmages around you for protection, but so you can also begin to learn to protect yourself.”

  Meriel was shaking her head before he’d finished. “That doesn’t make sense, Da. Mam has Lámh Shábhála, and you have Firerock. How could I be safer away from you?”

  “At Inishfeirm, you’ll have several Cloch Mórs and clochmions around you, all the time, as well as those who know slow magics. We both agree—”

  “But I don’t,” Meriel interrupted. “I don’t.”

  Her da’s face closed off. He wouldn’t look at her and she knew that she’d lost the argument, that nothing she said would be enough. “You don’t have a choice, my lamb,” he said. “If Jenna’s telling you as your mam isn’t enough, then she’ll tell you as the Banrion and First Holder. You don’t have a choice.”

  “We could run away,” Lucan said desperately. “Why, we could take one of the fisherfolk’s boats and go across to Talamh an Ghlas. We could travel to one of the southern Tuatha, or maybe even cross over the Finger to Céile Mhór. They wouldn’t find us. We could make our own lives.”

  They were on the rocks at the western end of the harbor near the noisy and busy Taisteal encampment, with Nainsi again acting as their lookout, though a trio of gardai from the keep had also been ordered by Jenna to go with them and were standing with Nainsi just out of sight. A mist was
falling, beading on their clóca; the waves splashing against the black rocks were gray and thick as porridge, and seals grunted and groaned out toward Little Head. Meriel and Lucan stood together, embracing each other, their faces close. Meriel could see the thrill of adventure blazing in Lucan’s green eyes. He’d already constructed a fantasy around the notion and she wanted desperately to share it, but she couldn’t. “My mam and da would come after us, and your da as well,” she told him.

  “They won’t find us. Not in Talamh an Ghlas. There are lost valleys there, and the old forests. We could hide there and an army couldn’t find us.” His voice was desperate and deep and the urgent certainty in it made her shake her head.

  “They wouldn’t need an army. They have the clochs na thintrí, Lucan, and my mam holds Lámh Shábhála. You don’t know how powerful that stone is—”

  “Those are folktales and myths, Meriel. Your mam doesn’t know about us, does she?”

  Meriel shook her head once, back and forth. “I don’t think so.”

  Lucan grinned. “There, you see? She can’t know everything. This is right, Meriel. Can’t you feel it? Let’s do it. Now, before we have a chance to talk each other out of it.” He leaned down to kiss her, and she reached up with one hand to touch his black beard, short and soft and still patchy on his cheeks. The kiss was long, deep, and sweet, yet when Lucan moved back, Meriel couldn’t stop the words that tumbled out.

  “If they find us, Lucan . . .”

  “If they find us, what can they do, Meriel? We’ll have been together. Alone. Intimate. We’re both Riocha and my family name is good enough even for the MacEagan clan: they’d insist that we marry, that’s all. And isn’t that what we want?”