Holder of Lightning Read online

  “Tonight we saw the signs of the Filleadh,” Aldwoman Pearce declared. “The first whisper that the bones of the land have stirred and will walk again, that what was Before will be Now. A hint, perhaps—” She stopped and glanced at Jenna’s mam again; a few of the others craning their necks to look back as well. “—that things that were hidden will be found again.”

  Some of the people muttered and nodded, but Thomas guffawed. “That’s nonsense, Aldwoman. The Before is Before, and the bones of the land are dead forever.”

  “The things I know aren’t written in any of your books, Thomas Miller,” the Ald sneered, tearing her hard gaze away from Maeve. “I know because my great-mam and great-da told me, and their parents told them, and so on back to the Before. I know because I hold history in my gray head, and because I listened. I know because my old bones feel it, and if you had a lick of sense in your head, you’d know it, too.”

  Thomas snorted, but said nothing. Aldwoman Pearce looked around the room, turning slowly, and again she fixed on Maeve. “What do you say, Maeve Aoire?”

  Jenna felt more than saw her mam shrug. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered.

  The Ald sniffed. “This is a portent, I tell you,” she said ominously. “And if they saw the lights all the way in Dún Laoghaire, the Riocha will be like a nest of hornets hit with a stick, and will be buzzing all around the whole of Talamh an Ghlas. The Rí Gabair will be sending his emissaries here soon, because we all saw that the lights were close and within his lands.” With that, Aldwoman Pearce drained her stout in one long swallow and called for more, and everyone began talking at once.

  By the time Tara’s clock-candle had burned down another stripe, Jenna was certain that no one in the tavern really knew what the lights had been at all, though it certainly made for a profitable evening for Tara—talking is thirsty work, as the old saying goes, and everyone wanted to give their impression of what they’d seen. Jenna slipped outside to escape the heat and the increasingly wild speculation, though Maeve was listening intently. Jenna shook her head as the closing door softened the din of a dozen conversations. She leaned against the drystone wall of the tavern, looking up at the crescent moon and the stars, gleaming and twinkling as if their stately transit of the sky had never been disturbed.

  She smelled the odor of the pipe a moment before she heard the voice and saw the glowing red circle at the corner of the tavern. “They’ll be going for another stripe, at least.”

  “Aye,” Jenna answered, “and they’ll all be complaining of it in the morning.”

  Laughter followed that remark, and Coelin stepped out from the side of the tavern, his form outlined in the glow from the tavern’s window. He took a puff on the pipe, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. “You saw it, too?”

  She nodded. “I was up on Knobtop, still, when the lights came. With our sheep.”

  “Then you saw it well, since it looked as if the lights were flaring all around old Knobtop. So what do you think it was?”

  “I think it was a gift from the Mother to allow Tara to sell more ale,” Jenna answered, and Coelin laughed again, with a full and rich amusement as musical as his singing voice. “Whatever it was, I also think that there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “That,” he said, “is the only intelligent answer I’ve heard tonight.” He tapped the pipe out against the heel of his boot, and sparks fell and expired on the ground. Coelin blew through the stem and tapped it again, then stuffed the pipe in the pocket of his coat. “They’ll be calling for me to play soon, wanting to hear all the old songs tonight, not the new ones.”

  “I like the old songs,” Jenna said. “It’s like hearing the voices of my ancestors. I close my eyes and imagine I’m one of them: Maghera, maybe, or even that sad spirit on

  Sliabh Colláin, always calling for her lover killed by the cloudmage.”

  “You have a fine imagination, then,” Coelin laughed.

  “Your voice has a magic, that’s all,” Jenna said, then felt herself blushing. She could imagine her mam listening, and telling her: You sound just like one of them. . . . Jenna was grateful for the dark. She looked away, to where Knobtop loomed above the trees, a blackness in the sky where no stars shone.

  “Ah, ’tis you who has the magic, Jenna,” Coelin said. “When you’re there listening, I find myself always looking at you.”

  Jenna felt her cheeks cool, and she stopped the laugh that wanted to escape. “Is that the kind of sweet lie you tell all of them, so they’ll come sneaking out to you afterward, Coelin Singer? It won’t work with me.”

  His eyes glittered in the light from the window, and the smile remained. “ ’Tis the truth, even if you won’t believe it. And you can tell your mam that the rumors about me are greatly exaggerated. I’ve not slept with all the young women hereabouts.”

  “But with some?”

  He might have shrugged, but the grin widened. “Rumors are like songs,” he said. He took a step toward her. “There always has to be a bit of truth in them, or they won’t have any power.”

  “You should make up a song about tonight. About the lights.”

  “I might do that,” he answered. “About the lights, and a beautiful young woman they illuminated—”

  The door to the tavern opened, throwing light over Jenna and Coelin and silhouetting the figure of Ellia, one of Tara’s daughters and Coelin’s current favorite. “Coelin! Put out that pipe of yours and . . .” A sudden frost chilled Ellia’s voice. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you out here, Jenna. Coelin, Mam says to get your arse inside; they want music.” The door shut again, more vehemently than necessary.

  “Ellia sounds . . .” Jenna hesitated, tilting her head at Coelin. “Upset,” she finished.

  “It’s been a busy night, that’s all,” Coelin answered.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’d better get in.”

  “Ellia would like that, I’m certain.”

  The door opened again. This time Jenna’s mam stood there. Coelin shrugged at Jenna. “I should go tune up,” he said.

  “Aye, you should.”

  Coelin smiled at her, winked, and walked past her to the door. “ ’Evenin’, Widow Aoire,” he said as Jenna’s mam stepped aside.

  “Coelin.” She let the door shut behind him, and crossed her arms.

  “We were talking, Mam,” Jenna said. “That’s all.”

  Maeve sniffed. Frown lines creased her forehead. “From what I saw, your eyes were saying different things than your mouth.”

  “And neither my eyes nor my mouth made any promises, Mam.”

  Inside the tavern, a rosined bow scraped against strings. Maeve shook her head, revealing the silvery gray that touched her temples. “I don’t trust the young man. You know that. He’d be no good for you, Jenna—wouldn’t know a ewe from a ram, a bull from a milch cow, or potato from turnip. Songmaster Curragh got him from the Taisteal; the boy himself doesn’t know who his parents are or where he came from. All he knows is his singing, and he’ll get tired of Ballintubber soon enough and want to find a bigger place with more people to listen to him and brighter coins to toss in his hat. He’d leave you, or you’d be tagging along keeping the pretty young things away from him, all the while with children tugging at your skirts.”

  “So you’ve already got me married and your grandchildren born. What are their names, so I’ll know?” Jenna smiled at her mam, hands on her hips. Slowly, the frown lines smoothed out, and Maeve smiled back, her brown-gold eyes an echo of Jenna’s own.

  “You want to go in and listen, darling?”

  “I’ll go in if you’re going, Mam. Otherwise, I’ll go home with you. I’ve had enough excitement for a night. Coelin’s voice might be too much for me.”

  Maeve laughed. “Come on. We’ll listen for a while, then go home.” She opened the door as Coelin’s baritone lifted in the first notes of a song. “Besides,” Maeve whispered as Jenna slipped past her, “it’ll be fun to watch Ellia’s
face when she sees Coelin looking at you.”

  2

  A Visitor

  IN the morning, it was easy to believe that nothing magical had happened at all. There were the morning chores: settling the sheep in the back pasture, cleaning out the barn, feeding the chicks and gathering the eggs, going over to Matron Kelly’s to trade a half dozen eggs for a jug of milk from her cows, doing the same with Thomas the Miller for a sack of flour for bread. By the time Jenna finished, with the sun now peering over the summit of Knobtop, it seemed that life had lurched back into its familiar ruts, never to be dislodged again. In the daylight, it was difficult to imagine curtains of light flowing through the sky.

  Jenna could smell Maeve frying bacon over the cook fire inside their cottage, and her stomach rumbled. Kesh was barking at her feet. She opened the door, ducking her head under the low, roughly carved lintel, and into the warm air scented with the smell of burning peat. The cottage was divided into two rooms—the larger space crowded with a single table and chairs and the kitchen area, and a small bedroom in the rear where Jenna and her mam slept. Maeve had helped Jenna’s father—Niall—build the wattle and daub house, but that was before Jenna had been born. She often wondered what he looked like, her da. Maeve had told her that Niall’s hair was red, not coal black like Jenna’s and Maeve’s, and his eyes were as blue as the deep waters of Lough Lár, and that his smile could light up a dark night. She knew little about him, only that he wasn’t from Ballintubber, but Inish Thuaidh, the fog-wrapped and cold island to the north and west. Jenna tried to imagine that face, and sometimes it looked like one person and sometimes another, and sometimes even an older Coelin. She wished she could see the memories that her mam saw, when she rocked in the chair and talked about him, her eyes closed and smiling. Jenna had no memory of Niall at all. “He was killed, my love,” Maeve had told her years ago when Jenna had asked, curious as to why she didn’t have a da when others did, “slain by bandits on his way to Bácathair. He was going there to see if he could gain a berth on one of the fishing ships, and maybe move you and me there. He always loved the sea, your da.”

  When Jenna grew older, she heard the other rumors as well, from the older children. “Your da was fey and strange, and he just left you and your mam,” Chamis Redface told her once, after he pushed her into a thicket of bramble. “That’s what my da says: your da was a crazy Inishlander, and everyone’s glad he’s gone. You go to Bácathair, and you’ll find him, sitting in the tavern and drinking, probably married to someone else and talking nonsense.” Jenna had flown at Chamis in a rage, bloodying his nose before he threw her off and Matron Kelly came by to pull them apart. When Maeve asked Jenna why she’d been fighting with Chamis, she just sniffed. “He tells lies,” she said, and would say nothing else.

  But she wondered about what Chamis had said. There were times when she imagined herself going to Bácathair and looking for him, and in those fantasies, sometimes, she found him. But when she did, invariably, she woke up before she could talk with him.

  The man you thought you saw, after you fell . . . He had red hair, and his eyes, they might have been blue . . . Jenna tried to shake the thought away, but she couldn’t. She saw his face again and found herself smiling.

  “I’m glad to see you’re so pleased with yourself,” her mam said as she came into the tiny house. “Here’s your breakfast. Give me the milk and the flour, and sit yourself down.” Maeve slid the wooden plate in front of Jenna, along with one of the four worn and bent forks they owned: eggs sizzling brown with bacon grease, a slab of brown bread with a pat of butter, a mug of tea and milk. “This afternoon I have to give Rafea two of the hens for the bolt of cloth she gave me last week.”

  “Give her the brown one and the white neck,” Jenna said. “They’re both fat enough, and neither one lays well.” Jenna slid her fork under a piece of bacon. “Mam, I think I’ll take the flock back up to Knobtop this afternoon.”

  Maeve’s back was to her as she cut a slice of bread for herself. “Up to Knobtop?” she asked. Her voice sounded strained. “After last night?”

  “It’s a nice day, the grass was good up there yesterday, and this time I’ll be sure I’m back earlier. Besides, Mam, in all the old stories, the mage-lights only come at night, never during the day.”

  Her mam hadn’t moved. The knife was still in her hand, the bread half cut. “I thought you might help me with the hens.” When Jenna didn’t answer, she heard Maeve sigh. “All right. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Aldwoman Pearce’ll be talking about it, though.”

  “Why should Aldwoman Pearce care if I go to Knobtop? Because I was there last night?”

  “Aye,” Maeve said. She set the knife down and turned, brushing at the front of her skirt. “Because of that, and . . .” She stopped. “Ah, it doesn’t matter. Go on with you. Take Kesh, and keep Old Stubborn out of trouble this time. I’ll expect you back before sundown. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Mam.” Jenna hastily finished her breakfast, gave Kesh the plate on the floor while she put her coat and gloves back on, and took the half loaf of brown bread her mother gave her, stuffing it into a pocket of the coat. “Come on, Kesh. Let’s get the sheep . . .” With a kiss for her mam, she was gone.

  By the time they reached the green-brown flanks of Knobtop, the sun had warmed Jenna and her coat was open. The sky was deep blue overhead and dotted with clouds, sailing in a stately fleet across the zenith. The sheep moved along with Kesh circling and nipping at their heels, their black-faced heads lowering to nibble at the heather. As they rose higher, Jenna could look back north and west and see the thatched roofs of Ballintubber in its clearing beyond the trees lining the path of the Mill Creek, and looking eastward, glimpse the bright thread of the River Duán winding its way through the rolling landscape toward Lough Lár. By noon, they were in the field where Jenna had seen the lights.

  She didn’t know what she had expected to see, but she found herself disappointed. There was no sign that anything unusual had happened here at all. Kesh herded the sheep into the largest grassy slope, and the flock set themselves to grazing—they paid no more attention to the area than they did to the pastures down in the valley.

  Jenna found a large, mossy boulder and sat down to rest from the climb. “Kesh! Keep them here, and don’t let Old Stubborn get away this time.” She pulled her mam’s brown bread from her pocket; as she did so, the pebble she’d picked up the previous night fell out onto the ground. She leaned down to pick it up.

  The touch of it on her fingers was so cold that she dropped the stone in surprise, then picked it up carefully, as if she were holding a chunk of ice. In the sunlight, there was the echo of the emerald brilliance the rock had seemed to possess when she’d first found it. She’d never seen a rock this color before: a lush, saturated green, crenellated with veins of pure, searing white that made her pupils contract when the sun dazzled from them. The stone looked as if it had been polished and buffed with jeweler’s rouge.

  And so cold . . . Jenna closed her right hand around the stone, thinking it would warm as she held it, but the cold grew so intense that it felt as if she’d taken hold of a burning ember. As it had last night, another vision settled over her eyes like a mist, as if she were seeing two worlds at once. The red-haired man was there again, still stooped over as he paced the slope of Knobtop, and again he turned to look at her. “I lost it . . .” he said, and then he faded. Other, stronger voices came to her: a dozen of them, two dozen, more; all of them shouting at her at once, the din clamoring in her ears though she could make out none of the words in the chaos.

  Jenna cried out (Kesh barking in alarm at her voice) and tried to release the stone, but her fingers wouldn’t open. They remained stubbornly clamped around the pebble, and the icy burning was climbing quickly from her hand to her wrist, onto her forearm, past the elbow . . . “No!” This time the words were a scream, as Jenna scrabbled frantically at her fisted hand, trying to pry the fingers open with her other hand as
the cold filled her chest, pounding like a foaming, crashing sea wave up toward her head, crashing down into her abdomen. The voices screamed. The cold fire filled her, and Jenna screamed again in panic. She could feel a surging power pressing against her, each fiber of her body taut and humming with wild energy. She lifted her hand, concentrating her will, imagining her fingers opening around the stone. Her fingers trembled as if she had a palsy, then sprang open. Coruscating light, brighter than the sun, flared outward, arcing in a jagged lightning bolt that struck ground a dozen strides away.

  The stone fell from her hand. A peal of thunder dinned in her ears and echoed from the hills around Knobtop. Breathless, Jenna sank to her knees in the grass.

  Whimpering, Kesh came up and licked her face while she tried to catch her breath, as the world settled into normalcy around her. Old Stubborn baaed nearby. Jenna blinked hard. Everything was normal, except . . .

  Where the lightning bolt had struck, there was a blackened hole in the turf, an arm deep and a stride across. The dirt there steamed in the air.

  Jenna’s intake of breath shuddered in amazement. “By the Mother, Kesh, did I . . . ?”

  The stone lay a hand’s breadth from her knee. Cradled in winter-browned heather, it seemed pretty and harmless. She reached out with a trembling forefinger and prodded it once. The surface seemed like any other stone, and she felt nothing. She touched it again, longer this time: it was still chilled, but not horribly so. She picked it up, careful not to close her hand around it again. “What do you think, Kesh?”

  The dog whimpered again, and barked once at her.

  Gingerly, she placed the stone back in her pocket.

  * * *

  “Is everything all right?” Maeve asked as Jenna brought the flock back to Ballintubber. “Thomas said he saw a bright flash up on Knobtop, and we all heard thunder even though the sky was clear.” The worry made her mam’s face look old and drawn. “Jenna, I was worried. After last night . . .”