Holder of Lightning

It was no longer raining at all, and the clouds had mostly cleared away, though the ground was still wet and muddy. Her boots were caked and heavy by the time she reached the cottage. Kesh came barking up to her as she approached. Jenna took off her boots, picked up a few cuttings of peat from the bucket inside the door, and coaxed the banked fire back into life until the chill left the room. Kesh padded after her as she went from the main room to their tiny bedroom and sat on the edge of the straw-filled mattress. She stared at the mud-daubed hole where the stone lay hidden.

"They say it's in their blood," Tiarna Mac Ard had said. "When I saw them, I wanted to go there…"

Jenna dropped to her knees in front of the hole. She picked at the dried mud with her fingernails until she could see the stone. Carefully, she pried it loose and held it in her open palm. So oddly plain, it was, yet…

It was cold again. As cold as the night she'd held it in her hand on Knobtop. Jenna gasped, thrust the stone into the pocket of her skirt, and left the bedroom.

She sat in front of the peat fire for a few minutes, her arms around herself. Kesh lay at her feet, looking up at her quizzically from time to time, as if he sensed that Jenna's thoughts were in turmoil.

She wondered whether she should go back to Tara’s and show the stone to Mac Ard, tell him everything that had happened on Knobtop. It would feel good to tell the truth-she knew that; she could feel the lie boiling inside, festering and begging for the lance of her words. Mam certainly seemed to trust the tiarna, and Jenna liked the way he spoke to her mam, and the way he treated the two of them. She could trust him, she felt. And yet…

He might be angry to find that she’d lied. So might her mam. Jenna swore-an oath she’d once heard Thomas the Miller utter when he’d dropped a sack of flour on his foot.

The ram, in the outbuilding, bleated a call of alarm. A few of the ewes also gave voice as Kesh’s ears went up and he ran barking to the door. Jenna followed, pulling the muddy boots back over her feet, guessing that a wolf or a pack of the wild pigs was prowling nearby, or that Old Stub-born had simply got himself stuck somewhere again. "What’s the matter with-" she began as she walked toward the pens.

She stopped, looking toward Knobtop.

Something sparked in the air above the peak: a flicker, a whisper of light. Then it was gone. But she’d seen true. She could still see the ghost of the light on the back of her eyes.

"Kesh, come on," she said.

She started toward Knobtop, her boots sloshing through the muck.

By the time she started walking up the mountain’s steep flanks, the sky flickered again with flowing streams and billows of colors, tossing multi-ple shadows behind her over the heather and rocks. Kesh barked at the mage-lights, lifting his snout up to the sky. They were brightening now, fuller and even more dazzling than they’d been the last time. By now, Jenna knew, someone in Ballintubber would have seen them. They’d be tumbling out of Tara’s, all of them, gawking. And Tiarna Mac Ard.

She imagined him, running to the stable behind Tara’s, leaping on his brown steed and riding hard toward Knobtop. . She frowned. Now that the lights had appeared again, she didn’t want to share them with him. They were hers. They had given her

the stone; they had shown her the red-haired man.

The stone. . She could feel its smooth weight now, cold and pulsing in the woolen pocket. She pulled the stone out: the pebble glowed, shim-mering with an echo of the sky above, the colors tinting her fingers as she held it. The mage-lights seemed to bend in the atmosphere directly above her, swirling like water, as if they sensed her presence below. Jenna lifted her hand, and the mage-lights coalesced, forming a funnel of sparkling hues above that danced and wriggled, lengthening and elongating. Jenna started to pull her hand away, but the funnel of mage-light had wrapped itself around her hand now, like a thread attached to the maelstrom in the sky above her. As she moved her hand, it stretched and swayed, a ball of glowing light attached to her wrist. She could feel the mage-lights, not hot but very, very cold, the chill creeping from wrist to elbow, to shoulder.

Jenna tried to pull away, desperately this time, but they held her like another hand, gripping her shoulders, the cold seeping into her chest and covering her head.

She swam in light. She closed her eyes, screaming in the bright silence, and she could still see the colors, melding and shifting.

Ethereal voices called to her.

A flash.

A deafening peal of thunder.

Blackness.

Kesh was licking her face.

Jenna rolled her head away, and the movement sent pain coursing through her neck and temples. Kesh whined as she shoved him away. "Get off," she told him. "I'm fine." She sat up, grimacing. "I hope so, anyway."