Holder of Lightning

the initial waves both to protect them and so that they appeared to be legitimate attacks: Mundy and another Brathair were assigned to the eastern forces and Moister Cleurach and the new cloudmage with the west. MacEagan, Aithne, and Jenna would remain with the main force.

The encampment woke before the dawn and began to move, assem-bling in the narrow valley, then moving up toward the low pass to the south. Their faces grim and set, they left behind the tents of the camp followers and their families as well as those too seriously wounded to walk. Many of those who went with the army were limping or still bearing blood-stained bandages from the battle a few days before, Jenna no less than any of them.

She walked with the cloudmages in the midst of the column: Banrion Aithne, MacEagan, Galen, Moister Cleurach, Mundy, and two other Brathairs of the Order, one of them new to his Cloch Mor.

Jenna felt as if she were walking into the face of her own doom.

Not long after noon, they were within a few miles of the city. There, the forces divided, and the main group waited for a few candle stripes to allow the others to begin the encirclement. Finally, with the sun already lowering in the west, they rose and started to climb up the long slope to the plateau where Dun Kiil Keep stood brooding and weeping over its town.

Jenna plodded along with the others. There was very little talk, all of them lost in their own reveries, their own hopes and fears, wondering perhaps if they would still be alive after this day.

Jenna felt only a dull fatalism. The miles she’d trudged that day had been exhausting on their own, a challenge for the slowly healing cuts and scrapes of her body, for muscles torn and taken to their limits only a few days before. She shivered under her thick woolen cloca, and her right arm was a block of flesh-colored ice against her side.

If Jenna herself was quiet, the voices inside Lamh Shabhala were not.

". . this is too soon. The last time nearly killed you…"

". . you’ll be with us, one of the ghosts within Lamh Shabhala, yammering at the next Holder… "

"Be still!" The voice was a near-roar in the mental din: Riata's voice. "Leave her alone if you have nothing to say that will help her."

"Riata!" Jenna thought to him, closing her mind's ears to the rest of them. "I'm so scared."

"Those who are the bravest are those who know what they face and still go to meet it," Riata answered.

"I'm not brave," Jenna answered. "I just want this to be done and over, even though…" She couldn't say the words. But Riata knew or guessed her thoughts.

"If you want to live, then you must use what you've learned. Go deeper into the stone, Jenna. Remember where you went at Bethiochnead. Find that place again."

"I don't know if I can. I only glimpsed it once, in pain and desperation. Riata, I don't care if I live. Not anymore. It doesn't matter."

"Find it!" Riata insisted, then his voice was gone again, drowned in the babble of the other Holders. Jenna forced them away from her, shoving them back down into the recesses of Lamh Shabhala.

"Are you all right?" She heard MacEagan's voice only faintly. Opening her eyes, Jenna realized that her hands were clasped over her ears as if the voices of the Holders had been physical and real.

She lowered them, shiv-ering as the cold reality of the mountains returned to her.

"I'm fine," she told him. Alby was standing just behind the tiarna, his soft hands around the hilt of a sword. "Is it time?"

"Nearly." MacEagan's gaze moved off to the ridge beyond which the Keep stood. "No matter how this ends, it will be remembered. The bards will be singing of it for the rest of time."

"I hope you have the chance to hear that song."

He didn't notice the stress on the "you." "So do I," MacEagan answered. "Win or lose, I've sent too many people to their graves today." He smiled wanly at her. "Of course, if we lose, I won't have to worry about the guilt, will I now? And if we win, why, I can console myself with the necessity of it all. I wonder if every leader feels that way."

"I doubt most of them think of it at all," Jenna answered.

He chuckled quietly; at the same time, the bass growl of thunder rolled loud from the south and west of them. A thunderhead appeared there, dark against the bright sky. "Moister Cleurach and Stormbringer," he said. "It’s begun." Already the soldiers were rushing all around them, and the banner of Inish Thuaidh waved at the head of the column. They began to move quickly, a bright swarm over the rocks and mosses of the hills.