Jenna found a large, mossy boulder and sat down to rest from the climb. 'Kesh! Keep them here, and don't let Old Stubborn get away this time.' She pulled her mam's brown bread from her pocket; as she did so, the pebble she'd picked up the previous
night fell out onto the ground. She leaned down to pick it up.
The touch of it on her fingers was so cold that she dropped the stone in surprise, then picked it up carefully, as if she were holding a chunk of ice. In the sunlight, there was the echo of the emerald brilliance the rock had seemed to possess when she’d first found it. She’d never seen a rock this color before: a lush, saturated green, crenellated with veins of pure, searing white that made her pupils contract when the sun dazzled from them.
The stone looked as if it had been polished and buffed with jewel-er’s rouge.
And so cold. . Jenna closed her right hand around the stone, thinking it would warm as she held it, but the cold grew so intense that it felt as if she’d taken hold of a burning ember. As it had last night, another vision settled over her eyes like a mist, as if she were seeing two worlds at once. The red-haired man was there again, still stooped over as he paced the slope of Knobtop, and again he turned to look at her. 'I lost it. .' he said, and then he faded. Other, stronger voices came to her: a dozen of them, two dozen, more; all of them shouting at her at once, the din clam-oring in her ears though she could make out none of the words in the chaos.
Jenna cried out (Kesh barking in alarm at her voice) and tried to release the stone, but her fingers wouldn’t open. They remained stubbornly clamped around the pebble, and the icy burning was climbing quickly from her hand to her wrist, onto her forearm, past the elbow. . 'No!' This time the words were a scream, as Jenna scrabbled frantically at her fisted hand, trying to pry the fingers open with her other hand as the cold filled her chest, pounding like a foaming, crashing sea wave up toward her head, crashing down into her abdomen. The voices screamed. The cold fire filled her, and Jenna screamed again in panic. She could feel a surging power pressing against her, each fiber of her body taut and hum-ming with wild energy. She lifted her hand, concentrating her will, imag-ining her fingers opening around the stone. Her fingers trembled as if she had a palsy, then sprang open. Coruscating light, brighter than the sun, flared outward, arcing in a jagged lightning bolt that struck ground a dozen strides away.
The stone fell from her hand. A peal of thunder dinned in her ears and echoed from the hills around
Knobtop. Breathless, Jenna sank to her knees in the grass.
Whimpering, Kesh came up and licked her face while she tried to catch her breath, as the world settled into normalcy around her. Old Stubborn baaed nearby. Jenna blinked hard. Everything was normal, except. .
Where the lightning bolt had struck, there was a blackened hole in the turf, an arm deep and a stride across. The dirt there steamed in the air.
Jenna's intake of breath shuddered in amazement. 'By the Mother, Kesh, did 1…?'
The stone lay a hand's breadth from her knee. Cradled in winter-browned heather, it seemed pretty and harmless. She reached out with a trembling forefinger and prodded it once. The surface seemed like any other stone and she felt nothing. She touched it again, longer this time: it was still chilled, but not horribly so. She picked it up, careful not to close her hand around it again. 'What do you think, Kesh?'
The dog whimpered again, and barked once at her.
Gingerly, she placed the stone back in her pocket.
'Is everything all right?' Maeve asked as Jenna brought the flock back to Ballintubber. 'Thomas said he saw a bright flash up on Knobtop, and we all heard thunder even though the sky was clear.' The worry made her mam's face look old and drawn. 'Jenna, I was worried. After last night. .'
All the way down from the high pasture, Jenna had debated with her-self over what she'd tell her mam. She'd thought at first that she'd tell her everything, how she'd found the stone after the lights, how it had seemed to glow, how the cold fury had consumed her until released. She wanted to describe the man she'd seen in the misty vision, and ask her: Could it be Da? But looking at Maeve now, seeing the anxiety and concern that filled her eyes, Jenna found that the carefully rehearsed words dissolved inside her. The fright she'd felt had faded and she seemed unhurt by the experience-why bother Mam with that now? Besides, she wasn't sure she could explain it: Mam might think she was making up tales, or wonder if Jenna had gone insane like Matron Kelly's son Sean, whose brain had been burned up by a high fever when he was a baby.
Sean talked as poorly as a three-year-old and babbled constantly to creatures only he could see. No, better to say nothing.
Jenna plunged her hand into her coat pocket, letting her fingertips roam over the pebble there. The stone felt perfectly normal now, like any
other stone, not even a hint of the coldness. Jenna smiled at her mam.
'I’m fine,' she said. 'A flash? Thunder? I really didn’t notice anything.' Jenna wasn’t used to lying to her mam-at least no more than any adoles-cent might be-and she was surprised at how easily the words came, at how casual and natural they sounded. 'I didn’t see anything, Mam. I thought I might, after last night, but everything was just. .' She shrugged, and brought her hand out of her pocket.'. . normal.'
Maeve’s head was cocked slightly to one side, and her eyes were nar-rowed. But she nodded. 'Then get the sheep in, and come inside. I have some stirabout ready to eat.' She continued to regard Jenna for a long breath, then turned and entered the cottage.
That was all Jenna heard on the subject. She took the stone out of her Pocket that night after her Mam was asleep, hiding it in a chink in the wall next to her side of the bed and covering it with mud. It was dangerous, she told herself, and shouldn’t be handled. But every morning, when she woke up, she looked at the spot, brushing her fingers over the dried mud. She found the touch comforting.
That night, she dreamed of the red-haired man, so real that it seemed she could touch him. 'Who are you?' she asked him, but instead of an-swering her, he shook his head and wandered off toward Knobtop. She followed, calling to him, but she was caught in the slow motion of a dream and could never catch up. When she woke, she found that she couldn’t remember his features at all; they were simply a blur, unreal.
She looked at the mud-covered spot where the stone lay, and that, too, seemed unreal. She could almost believe there was nothing there. Nothing there at all.
Over the next few days, the excitement in Ballintubber about the lights over Knobtop
gradually died, even though the stories about that night grew with each telling, until someone listening might have thought that entire armies of magical creatures had been seen swirling in the air above the mount, wailing and crying. A good quarter of the village of Ballintub-ber had been up on Knobtop that night, too, if the tales that were told in Tara's were to be believed. But though the tales grew more elaborate, the night sky over Knobtop remained dark for the next three nights, and life returned to normal.
Until the fourth day.
The day was gloomy and overcast, with the lowering clouds dropping a persistent cold rain that permeated through clothing and settled into sinew and bone. The world was swathed in gray and fog, with Knobtop lost in the haze. Ballintubber's single cobbled lane was a morass of pud-dles and mud with occasional islands of wet stone. The smoke of turf fires rose from the chimneys of Ballintubber, gray smoke fading into gray skies, and the rain pattered from the edges of thatch into brown pools.
Rain couldn't alter the pace of life in Ballintubber, nor in fact anywhere in Talamh an Ghlas. It rained three or four days out of seven, after all, the year around. Rain in its infinite variety kept the land lush and green: startlingly bright and refreshing drizzles in the midst of sunshine; foggy rains where the clouds seemed to sink into the very earth and the air was simply wet; soaking, hard spring downpours that awakened the seeds in the ground; summer rains as warm and soft as bathwater; rare winter storms of snow and sleet to blanket the world in white and vanish in the next day's sun; howling and shrieking hurricanes from off the sea that lashed and whipped the land. Rain was simply a fact of life. If it rained, you got wet; if the sun was out or it was cloudy, you didn't-that was all. The chores still needed to be done, the work still went on. A little rain couldn't bring the activity in Ballintubber to a halt.
But the appearance of the rider did.
Through the open doors of the small barn behind Tara's Tavern, Jenna saw Eliath, Tara's son and youngest at twelve years of age, currying down the steaming body of a huge brown stallion. Jenna was pushing a barrow of new-cut turf toward home; she detoured to see the horse, which looked far too large and healthy to be one of the local work animals.
'Hey, Eli,' she said, setting down the barrow just inside the door where it was out of the rain.
Eli glanced up from his work. The horse turned his great neck to glance at Jenna and nickered. She went over and rubbed his long muzzle. Eli grinned. 'Hey, Jenna. That’s some animal, isn’t it?'
