'You would do that for us?' Maeve asked.
'I would do it for her' Seancoim answered. He pointed to Jenna, his blank white eyes looking in her direction.
'Why me?' Jenna asked.
Seancoim gave Jenna his broken smile. 'Because the Bunus Muintir have our songs and tales also.'
'What is that supposed to mean?' Mac Ard said.
'It means what it means,' Seancoim answered. The smile vanished as he looked at Mac Ard.
'That’s all.'
'I’m suspicious of those who hide their intentions in riddles,' Mac Ard retorted. 'I’m especially suspicious when that person’s a Bunus Muintir.'
Seancoim snorted. 'If I wanted you dead, Tiarna Mac Ard, you would already be dead.'
Mac Ard scowled. 'Are you threatening us?'
'It's no threat at all. Only the truth. All I had to do was leave you where you were in the forest-that would have been enough on a night when the trees were singing. If I wanted to be more certain, I could have led
Chapter 8: The Cairn of Riata
EVEN by day, the forest was dim. They moved through valleys of fog-shrouded trees, pacing alongside fast- moving brooks whose foam made the dark water seem almost black by contrast. They caught rare glimpses of sky, blue now that the high mist had burned off, and every so often walked through columns of gold-green light, their boots crushing a thousand tiny images of the sun on the forest floor.
Jenna had often walked through the woods near Ballintubber, but they felt different: lighter, airier, with the trees spaced farther apart and well-worn paths meandering among them. They were old, too, those woods, but Jenna had never felt that the forest itself watched her, judging her and deciding whether it would allow her to stay.
She felt a Presence here. Here, there were musty vapors rising from the ground, and red-crowned, sinister mushrooms peering from between piles of decaying leaves decades old, screens of mistletoe and bramble that tugged at her with thorny fingers, vine-wrapped hollows between close-set oaks in which night nestled eternal. There were trails that Seancoim followed: thin, narrow paths that might have been made by deer or other animals, twisting through the underbrush and vanishing suddenly. Doire Coill was a maze where they found themselves walking the bottom of a hollow with sides too steep to climb, all white fog ahead and behind, so that they moved between walls of brown and green until Seancoim turned into a hidden break that Jenna knew she would have missed, a narrow pass through to another fold of land bending in a slightly different direc-tion, all of them leading to some unseen destination. And if she had found herself suddenly alone and lost, it would do no good to cry for help. The forest swallowed sound, muffling it, making words indistinct and small.
Jenna was certain that she would call only whatever fey creatures Doire Coill held within its confines.
By the time the sun had reached its height and started to decline, Jenna knew that if Seancoim were to vanish into the fog around them, they would never find their way back. She said nothing, but the scowl that lurked on Mac Ard's face and the frown
twisting Maeve’s lips told her that the other two realized it as well.
As evening approached, the hillsides spread out slightly to either side of them before curving back in to each other, so that they walked in the center of a bowl several hundred strides across, the trees all around them with open sky directly above. In the center of the bowl, gray with the persistent fog, a dolmen loomed, a pair of massive, carved standing stones two people high with another block laid over the top, large enough that several people could walk between them abreast as if through a door. Arrayed around the central stones in a circle were six cairns covered with earth and grass, the narrow entrances of the passage graves arranged so that each looked out onto the central stones. Seancoim continued to walk between the graves toward the dolmen as Denmark flew away to land on the capstone, but the others stopped at the entrance to the valley of tombs. Jenna stared at the dolmen, at the notches carved in them that were Bunus Muintir writing, wondering what was inscribed there.
'Who is buried in this place?' Mac Ard asked. 'These must be the graves of kings and heroes, yet I’ve never heard anyone speak of this valley.'
'You’re not supposed to know it,' Seancoim answered, 'though a few Daoines have been here and seen the graves. We’ve kept it hidden, in our own ways, because the last chieftains of the Bunus Muintir rest here.' He nodded in the direction of one of the mounds. 'Maybe you would know this one. In there is Ruaidhri, who fought the Daoine at Lough Dubh and was wounded, and died weeks later.'
Died from the wounds from Crenel Dahgnon’s sword,' Mac Ard said. To Jenna, the name seemed to draw echoes from the hills around them, like clouds running before a storm, and she thought she heard the angry whispers from the mouths of the passage graves, or perhaps it was only the wind blowing across the entrances.
Seancoim shook his head, while Denmark flapped his black wings
angrily. 'That’s not a name one should speak here, but aye, that’s the
Daoine R1 whose blows shattered Ruaidhri’s shield and killed him, and
Hugh Dubh would be the last time any of the Bunus Muintir chieftains would put an army on the field.' Seancoim pointed to the largest grave, aligned directly with the dolmen at the far end of the valley. 'There is Riata. Do you know of him?'
Jenna shook her head, as did Maeve, but Mac Ard took in a breath that caused Seancoim to laugh.
'Ah,' he said, 'so you have listened to some of our old tales. Riata-he was the last, and perhaps the most powerful, of the Bunus cloudmages. The mage-lights vanished for us a scant three generations before you Daoine came. If they hadn't, if we had our mages wielding the clochs na thintri when the Daoine came, then perhaps all that would be left of your people would be a few haunted barrows. Or perhaps if we hadn't become so dependent on that magic, we would not have been so easily displaced when you came.' He lifted his hands and let them fall again like wounded birds. 'Only the gods can see down those paths.'
'Do we have to stay here?' Jenna asked. 'It's getting late.' The entire valley was in deep shadow now, and Jenna felt cold, though the sky above was still bright.
'It's late,' Seancoim agreed, 'and it's not safe to travel here at night. We'll stay there.' Seancoim pointed to the ridge beyond the valley.
Mac Ard grimaced. 'That's a long climb, and close to this place.'
'They say restless ghosts walk here, and Ruaidhri is among them,' Seancoim answered. He cocked his head at Mac Ard. 'If I were Daoine, I might be afraid of that.'
'I'm not afraid of a spirit,' Mac Ard said, scowling. 'Fine, old man. We'll stay here.'
'Aye, we will,' Seancoim told him, 'unless you want to go back on your own.' He turned away, calling Denmark back to him, then walking on through the dolmen. After a moment, Jenna and the others followed, though Jenna walked carefully around the dolmen rather than going under its capstone, and didn't look into the cold archways of the barrow graves at all.
Jenna had thought that it would be impossible to sleep that night, unpro-tected under the oaks and so near the Bunus tombs. Exhaustion proved
stronger than fear, and she was asleep not long after she lay down near their tiny fire, only to be awakened sometime later by a persistent throb-bing near her leg and in her head. She opened her eyes, disoriented. The fire had died to embers. Her mam and Mac Ard were asleep, sleeping close to each other and not far from her; Seancoim and Denmark were nowhere to be seen. Jenna blinked, closing her eyes against the throbbing and touching her leg-as she did so, her hand closed on the stone under the cloth. It was pulsing in time with the pain in her temples. As she lay there, she thought she heard her name called: a soft, breathy whisper wending its way between the trunks of the trees. 'Jenna…' it came, then again: 'Jenna…'
Jenna sat up in her blankets.
There was light shifting through the leaves: a rippling, dancing, familiar shining high in the sky and very near. She thought of calling to her mam, then stopped, knowing Mac Ard would awaken with Maeve. Part of her didn’t want Mac Ard to see the lights, didn’t want his interference. Jenna rose to her feet and followed the elusive glimmering.
A few minutes later, she stood at the rim of the valley of Bunus tombs, looking out down the steep, treeless slope to the circles of graves and the dolmen at its center. She could see them very clearly, for directly above the valley the mage-lights were shimmering. Their golden light washed over the mounds of earth and rock in waves, as
