Holder of Lightning

The first whirling tendril of the mage-lights had closed around her hand and the cloch, and the freezing touch seeped into the patterns etched in the flesh of her arm: as Maeve and Mac Ard rushed toward her and stopped at the balcony doors; as the people below exclaimed and gestured toward her; as the mage-lights enveloped her, encased her in color as energy poured from the sky into Lamh Shabhala; as Jenna screamed with pain but also with a sense of relief and satisfaction, as if the filling of the cloch’s reservoirs of power also fulfilled a need in herself she hadn’t known existed. She clenched her fist tight around the stone while billows of light fell from the sky and swept through and into her, as she and Lamh Shabhala shouted affirmation back to them.

Then, abruptly, it was over. The sky went dark; Jenna fell to her knees, gasping, holding the stone against her breast. Lamh Shabhala was open in her mind, a sparkling matrix of lattices, the reservoir of power at its core stronger now, though not yet nearly full. That would come, she knew. Soon. Very soon.

"Jenna!" Her mam sank to the balcony floor in front of her, hands clutching Jenna’s shoulders. "Jenna, are you all right?" Jenna looked up, seeing her through the matrix of the stone. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She blinked, and Lamh Shabhala receded in her sight. The full agony of the mage-lights was beginning now, but she would not lose consciousness this time.

She was stronger. She could bear this.

"Help me up," she said, and felt Maeve and Mac Ard lift her to her feet. She stood, cradling her right arm to her. She shrugged the hands away, and took a few wobbling steps back into her room, with the tiarna and her mam close beside her. She sat on the edge of her bed, as her mam bustled about, shouting to the servant to bring boiling water and the anduilleaf paste. Mac Ard knelt in front of her, reaching out as if to touch her arm. Jenna drew back, scowling.

"It wanted me, not you," she told him. "It's mine now, and I won't let you have it. I won't ever let you have it."

She wasn't sure what she saw in his eyes then.

"I'm sorry, Padraic," she said. "I didn't mean that. It's just the pain."

He stared at her for long seconds, then he nodded. "I'm not a danger to you, Jenna," he said, his voice low enough so that only Jenna could hear him. "But there are others who will be. You'll find that out soon enough." He stood then.

"I leave her to you, Maeve," he said, more loudly. "I'll send for the healer. But I doubt that he has anything that will help her now."

PART TWO: Filleadh

(Map: Lar Bhaile)

Chapter 16: Lar Bhaile

IF Ath Iseal felt large and crowded to Jenna, Lar Bhaile was immense beyond comprehension. The city spread along the southeastern arm of Lough Lar, filling the hollows of the hills and rising on the green flanks of Goat Fell, a large, steep-sloped mountain that marked the end of the lough. Along the summit of Goat Fell ran the stone ramparts of the Ri's Keep, twin walls a hundred yards apart, opening into a wide courtyard where the keep itself

stood, towering high above the city. Behind those walls lived RI Gabair, whose birth name was Torin Mallaghan, in his court with the Riocha of Tuath Gabair gathered around him.

Jenna could well imagine how Tiarna Mac Ard could have seen the mage-lights over Ballintubber from those heights, flickering off the night-clad waters of the lough.

She looked up those heights now from the market in what was called Low Town along the lake’s shore, and they seemed impossibly high, a distant aerie of cut granite and limestone. Jenna judged that it had taken her at least a candle stripe and a half to ride down from the heights in Tiarna Mac Ard’s carriage; it would take two or more to wend their way back up the narrow road that wound over the face of Goat Fell.

But that was for later. Now was the time for business.

Jenna glanced at the trio of burly soldiers who accompanied her. Nei-ther the Ri nor Tiarna Mac Ard would allow her to leave the keep alone. At first, she hadn’t minded, not after the escape from Ballintubber. But in the intervening two months, the initial feeling of safety had been replaced by a sense of stifling confinement. She was never alone, not even in the rooms the Ri had arranged for her at the keep-there were always gardai stationed outside the door and servants waiting just out of sight for a summons. The cage in which she found herself was jeweled and golden, plush and comfortable, but it was nonetheless a cage.

"For your own safety," they told her. "For your protection."

But she knew it wasn’t for her protection. It was for the protection of the cloch.