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

Almost contemptuously, Jenna took a part of the energy in which she was ensnared and sent it toward the dragon. The power smashed into the creature, nearly blinding Jenna with a showering explosion of white and blue. The mage-dragon howled in agony and vanished, but mocking laughter followed its disappearance: baritone, a bit too loud. She lowered her hand and the mage-lights curled reluctantly away into sky, fading. She could see him now, standing not ten strides from her—at the edge of the small courtyard enclosed within the private inner bailey of Dun Kiil Keep. He was a young man, no older than twenty, dressed in a silken, well-made clóca and léine, red-haired and thin of face, with a jewel grasped in his right hand—like Jenna’s own hand, it too was scarred, though lightly, a barely visible marking that stopped at the wrist. She knew him immediately, even though she’d last seen him several years before, when he’d been a pimpled, gawky adolescent: Doyle Mac Ard.

She wondered how he’d gotten here—to her island, inside her keep, but she refused to let him see that his presence worried her.
“Strike him down while you have the chance . . .”
the voices of the old Holders within Lámh Shábhála whispered to her, but she ignored them, confronting the intruder with a scowl. “Only a fool would attack the Holder of Lámh Shábhála alone, especially when the mage-lights are out, Doyle.”

“I’m not a fool,” the man answered. “I was simply announcing my arrival. And you’re as strong as they told me you would be, Sister.”

“
Half
sister,” she answered. A sudden, shivering fright came over her—she could think of only one reason why Doyle would appear here to speak with her. “How is Mam?”

Again, his noisy amusement echoed. “So nice of you to still care. I rather expected an immediate ‘You’re not welcome in Inish Thuaidh, Doyle’ or ‘I’ll kill you the way I killed your da.’ Of course, if you
really
cared for her, you would have actually come to see her once over the years. I hardly think your occasional letters to her count, though she stopped me when I tried to burn them.”

Jenna didn’t answer. She longed to justify her absence:
I asked her if she would see me in the letters, but she never answered. . . .
She waited, and after a moment, Doyle sniffed. She saw the answer to her question in the lines of his face before he even spoke the words. “Mam’s dead. She passed two days ago. I thought I might tell you before you heard from your spies in the Tuatha.”

“Dead . . .” Jenna didn’t know what to say. “No . . .” Tears started in her eyes, brimming to run down her cheeks. She tried to speak and couldn’t, the sudden grief closing her throat. An image flashed before her: Maeve, as she’d been the day Jenna had found Lámh Shábhála: the age Jenna was now, her hair a satin blackness sparked with wisps of pure white at the temples, and a smile creasing her face. Jenna blinked, and the vision faded. “How?” she asked finally, unable to get out more than the single word.

“Does it really matter to you? You’re a few decades too late for genuine concern, aren’t you?” Doyle responded. When Jenna just stared at him, he finally shrugged. “She hasn’t been in good health for the last few years, as I’m sure your spies reported back to you, and the last winter was especially hard on her. I assure you that she was always well-cared for by Da’s family. When she was lost in her final madness, they made certain she didn’t hurt herself. I saw her as often as I possibly could, because I loved her and wanted her to know how much I will always be in her debt for having raised me. But
I
was never the child she most wanted to hear that from. Is that what you wanted to know?” A deliberate hesitation; a half smile. “My dear sister.”

Jenna stared past him, not allowing any of the pain inside to show on her face. The residue of the mage-lights pounded in her temples, throbbing, and she longed to put a warm cloth over her eyes and take some kala bark to ease the headache. She wanted to be alone to grieve for the mam she remembered. “You sound surprisingly like your da,” she said. “You’re too young to be this cynical.”

“I’ve had to grow up fast,” he responded.

“Why are you here, Doyle?”

“Not
how?
I’d think you’d worry about me just showing up in Dún Kiil.”

“I can guess how. The library at Inishfeirm tells of a Cloch Mor—‘Quickship,’ isn’t it?—with the ability to move people to places its holder has been, so one of the Rí Ard’s tiarna must have found that stone and learned how it works.”

“Indeed.” Doyle gestured mockingly at the high, crenellated walls about them. “Aren’t you glad that it was me who came and not some assassin?”

The voices grumbled inside her—
“. . . kill him . . .”
—but she took a calming breath, pushing them back. “Don’t threaten me, Doyle. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

Doyle gave her a wide-mouthed look of false astonishment, his empty hands palms out in front of him, then laughed again. “Actually, I think I have a
very
good idea of what you’re capable of doing. I wouldn’t presume that I have any ability to frighten the Banrion and First Holder. In fact, I’m here to do you a service. I’m here to give fair warning to my kin.” His face went serious then, and he released the jewel he was holding, letting it fall to his breast on its chain. “I’m a man now, sister; a mage of the Order of Gabair and a tiarna in the service of the Rí Ard O Liathain and fully in his confidence.”

“And also betrothed to Nevan O Liathain’s daughter and to be married to her at the Festival of Fómhar,” Jenna interrupted. “Given a Cloch Mór by the Rí Ard himself. I
do
hear these things, brother.”

“
Half
brother.” Doyle grinned. “I hear things as well. I hear what the Riocha say: about Inishlanders in general and their Banrion in particular. They think you’re arrogant and above yourself; they think you’ve done little or nothing with the power you control; they think you’re mad and dangerous and you hide here like a hermit; and they believe someone more . . . well,
deserving
should hold Lámh Shábhála.”

Jenna tightened her fingers around the finger-sized stone in its silver cage. “I know at least some of those you talk about. Then let Nevan O Liathain or any of them try to take Lámh Shábhála from me.” Her voice took on heat now—if she could not let herself grieve, then she’d let anger cover the turmoil inside her. “Perhaps you’d like to bring back your mage-dragon again and make the attempt yourself? I remember Snapdragon—the cloch you now hold—from Dún Kiil. I’ll tell you that it will fare no better now than it did then.”

Doyle simply shook his head. “We’re not stupid, Jenna. Especially not the Rí Ard. But Dún Kiil was a long time ago, and memories dim and time grows shorter for the ones who were there. We young tiarna don’t remember it at all. Why, I was just a babe suckling at our mam’s breast when you murdered Da.”

“It wasn’t murder, Doyle,” Jenna snapped. The headache and grief pounded at her skull; her right arm ached as if it were made of glacial ice.
“. . . smash him for his arrogance and be done with it . . .”

“Of course, you wouldn’t call it that. How do you think of it, Jenna? ‘Self-defense?’—no, it couldn’t be
that,
when you’ve already bragged to me that you don’t consider one piddling Cloch Mór a challenge for Lámh Shábhála. Or was it just a happy accident of some sort, just a twist of unkind fate? What was it you told Mam when you gave her Da’s body? ‘He gave me no choice . . .’ No, there’s no blame on you, sister. There’s no guilt to stain
your
soul when the Black Haunts come for you.”

Jenna blinked away the memories. She set her jaw against the pain, both mental and physical. “We can dance with words all night, Doyle. If you wanted to chastise me for my past, you could have done it more easily in a letter. What is it you want?”

A sniff. “I’m telling you all this, Sister, so that I can go to Mam’s barrow with a clear conscience and tell her that I warned you, that I made the attempt to avoid bloodshed between us. It’s she who has protected you all these years, Jenna. You probably don’t realize that. She told me that she couldn’t bear to see her children fighting each other, so I obeyed her. But she’s gone now.
You
may be too strong to attack directly, Jenna, but those around you, those you love, aren’t so well protected and to hurt
you,
someone might decide to go after them. Your enemies might feel they have no other choice. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

The image came to her of her lover Ennis, his throat slit open in front of Jenna as she watched helplessly . . . Jenna closed her eyes against the horrible vision etched forever in her memory, forcing back the hot tears that threatened her again. She took a slow breath and opened her eyes again. “I understand that better than you’ll ever realize,” she told Doyle.

“Good,” he answered. “Then I’ve done what I came to do. As to what
I
want . . .” Doyle stared at her, then let his gaze move slowly to her hand, where she clutched Lámh Shábhála. “I want what should have been Da’s in the beginning,” he said quietly. “I want what should have been mine. And I
will
have it.” His gaze came back to her eyes. His stare was unblinking and steady. “One day, I will have it. And aye, I know what that means.”

He touched the stone at his chest and Jenna started in alarm. The voices inside Lámh Shábhála screamed at her—
“Fool! Kill him now!”
—but Doyle didn’t release the power of his cloch nor did the dragon appear. Instead, he was simply gone, soundlessly, as if he had never been there at all.

Jenna let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.

A garda’s step scrunched on gravel, and Jenna saw a face peering through the garden gate as he called out to her. “Banrion, is everything all right? I thought I heard another voice. . . .”

“Just a ghost,” she told him. “The air tonight is alive with ghosts.”

M
ERIEL’S mam was at the window, staring out toward the cliffs of Croc a Scroilm, the “Hill of Screaming” atop which Dún Kiil Keep sat. “Your daughter’s arrived, Banrion,” the hallway garda announced, allowing Meriel to enter the room and then swiftly closing the door behind her. With the click of the door lock, her mam sighed as if in resignation and turned.

“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?”