Holder of Lightning

She should have been horrified. But she felt the throbbing of the trees and the earth and realized that this was as it should be, that the Seanoir fed on life in the same way Jenna fed on life. She ate the meat of animals that had once been alive, and soaked up their juices with bread from the wheat that had waved in fields under the sun a month before. This was simply another part of the greater cycle in which they were all caught There was no horror here. No malevolence, no evil. The trees simply did as their nature demanded. If they killed,

it was not out of hatred, but because their view of the world was far longer and broader than that of the races whose lives were impossibly fleeting.

A branch came down; it lifted the cloch at Jenna's neck and let it drop again. "They know Lamh Shabhala," Seancoim said. "It is nearly as old as they are. They know it lives again." He went up to the largest of the trees and lifted his hand. A branch above wriggled, and a large acorn dropped into his palm. "Here," he told Jenna. He folded the nut in her left hand, closing her fingers around the acorn and putting his own leathery hands over hers. "For the Seanoir, the mage-lights signal a time of growing. Even the seasons themselves are too fast for them. The lights are the manifesta-tion of a burgeoning centuries-long spring and summer for them, and this is their seed. Take this with you when you go, and plant this where you find your new home. Then you will always have part of Doire Coill with you. Make a new place for them."

Moonlight shimmered through moving branches, and the leaves spoke their words. Jenna nodded to the Seanoir, the ancient oaks of Doire Coill.

"I will," she said. "And I'll always remember."

They left that morning before the sun rose, their faces toward the constel-lation of the Badger, whose snout always points north. They said little besides idle talk of the weather, and if O'Deoradhain noticed that Jenna paralleled the High Road and that Knobtop crept slowly closer to them as the sun rose behind a wall of gray clouds, he said nothing. By evening, they were close to Ballintubber, with Knobtop rising high on their right hand, its bare stony summit still in sunlight even though the marshes on either side of the road were wrapped in shadow. As they approached the Bog Bridge, O'Deoradhain placed his hand on Jenna's arm. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"I need to see this."

He looked as if he were about to argue, but he swallowed the words and shrugged. "Then let's hurry, before we're walking in the dark."

A few hundred strides beyond the bridge, they came to the lane which led to Jenna's home. The lane was overgrown, the grass high where once the sheep had kept it cropped close and the hay wagon had worn ruts in the earth. Jenna turned into the

lane, hurrying now down the familiar path around the bend she recalled so well. She wasn’t certain what she expected to see: perhaps the house as it had once been, with her mam at the door and Kesh barking as he ran out toward her, and smoke curling from the chimney.

Instead, there was ruin. The house had mostly returned to earth. Only a roofless corner remained, overgrown with vines and brush. Where the barn had been there was only a mound. She walked forward with a stum-bling gait: there was the door stone, worn down in the center from boots and rain, but it sat in the midst of weeds, the door itself only a few blackened boards half-buried in sod and grass. The chimney had col-lapsed, but the hearth was still there, blackened from the fire that had destroyed the house, and her mam’s cooking pot, rusted and broken, lay on its side nearby.

Here was where she had slept and laughed and lived, but it was only a ghost now. The bones of a dead existence. The silence here was the silence of a grave.

"I’m sorry," O’Deoradhain said. Jenna started at the sound of his voice; lost in reverie, she hadn’t heard his approach. "I can imagine it looked beautiful, once."

She nodded. "Mam always had flowers on the windowsill, red and blue and yellow, and I knew every stone and crack in the walls. ."A sob shook her shoulders, and she felt O’Deoradhain’s arms go around her. His touch dried the tears, searing them with anger. She shrugged his embrace away, her hands flailing. "Get off me!" she shouted at him, and he backed away, hands wide and open.

"I’m sorry, Holder," he said.

Jenna’s right hand went automatically to Lamh Shabhala, touching the stone. A faint glimmer of light shone between her fingers, turning them blood-red. "You don’t ever touch me. Do you understand?"

He nodded. His face was solemn, but there was something in his pale green eyes she could not read, a wounding caused by her words. He turned away and dropped his pack from his shoulders as Jenna slowly relaxed.

She let go of the cloch and its light faded. Her arm