Lamh Shabhala pulled at the sky-magic, sucking in the power like a ravenous beast. 'No!' O'Deoradhain and Riata shouted as one. 'You must direct the cloch this time, Jenna,' O'Deoradhain continued, his voice shouting in her ear but almost lost in the internal din of the mage-lights as they crackled and seethed around her. 'You must go up to the mage-lights, not let Lamh Shabhala bring them down to you.'
'How?' Jenna raged at him. 'Do you think I can fly?' This was nothing she had experienced before with the cloch. She seemed to be in the mid-dle of a coruscating storm, flailing and trying to hold her ground, nearly blind and deaf in its brilliance and roar. Riata's voice answered her, calm and soft as always, cutting through the bedlam.
'Think it,' he said, 'and it will be.'
Her arm burned, the scars as bright as lightning. She lifted the cloch toward the sky and imagined rising into the maelstrom above. Her per-ception shifted: she was outside herself. She could see her
body on the ground, arm lifted, and yet she was also above with the mage-lights run-ning through and around and with her, the land spread like a tapestry below. She was Lamh Shabhala; she was the power within it. Voices and shapes surrounded her in the dazzling space and she knew them: all the ones who had held an active Lamh Shabhala before her: Severii O’Coulghan, who like Riata had been Last Holder; Tadhg O’Coulghan, his father who had held it before Severii; Rowan Beirne, Bryth and Sinna Mac Ard; Eilis MacGairbhith, the Lady of the Falls, and Aodhfin O Liathain, the lover who had betrayed and killed her to take the cloch; Caenneth Mac Noll, also a First, and the first Daoine to hold an active Lamh Shabhala. The Bunus Muintir Holders were there too-Riata, Davali, Oengus. There were hundreds of them: Daoine, Bunus Muintir, and peoples unknown to her, stretching back thousands of years. And they spoke, a babble of voices that rivaled the sound of the mage-lights.
'. So young, this one.'
’… She’s too young. Too weak. Lamh Shabhala will consume her.'
'… I was a First and I died the night I opened the clochs, as will she. .'
'… let her undergo the Scrudu, too. Now, before this happens, and if she lives. .
’Now is not the time for the Scrudu. She must wait for that test until later, as I did. Lamh Shabhala chose her, and sent her to me.' That was Riata, calm. 'There is a reason it was her… ' 'What must I do?' Jenna asked them. Her voice was phosphorescence and glow. A hundred voices answered, a jumble of contradiction. Some were amused, some were hostile, some were sympathetic.
'. . die!'
'. . give up the clock while you can…'
'. . hold onto yourself… '
She ignored them and listened for Riata’s voice. 'Feel the presence of the other clocks…'
'I do.' She could sense them all, scattered over the land yet tied to Lamh Shabhala with streamers of green- white energy. The channels led to the well within the cloch.
'Fill the cloch now,' Riata told her, though other voices wailed laughter or warning. 'Open it. .'
'You are the cloch,' said another voice, fainter and paler: O'Deoradhain.
She imagined Lamh Shabhala transparent and without boundaries. Nothing happened. She drifted above the valley, snared in lambent splen-dor, but there was no change. She looked at her arm, saw light reflecting from it. A beam curled around her, and she willed it to enter her. Blue-green rays crawled the whorls of scars, and she gasped as the radiance entered in her and through her, surging into the cloch she held. Like a dam bursting under the pressure of a flood, the mage-lights suddenly whirled about her, following the path she had made, more and more of the energy filling her as she screamed in ecstasy and fear. Unrelenting, it poured inward. Lamh Shabhala was utterly full, too bright to gaze upon, shuddering and quivering in her hand as if it might break apart. And the pain came with the power: white, stabbing needles of it, driving deep into her flesh and her soul, a torment beyond anything she'd endured before.
The mage-lights were a thunderous cacophony into which she shouted uselessly. In a moment, she would be lost, swept away in currents that she could not control. She ached to release it, to simply let it pass through her, to end this.
'Hold onto the magic, Jenna!' The voice was Riata's or O'Deoradhain's or both. 'You must hold onto it!' they shouted again, and she screamed back at them.
'I can't!'
'Jenna, Lamh Shabhala will open the way for the other clocks through you. It is too late now for anything else. The only choice to be made is whether you will use Lamh Shabhala or it you.'
'. . too young. . too weak. . she will die. .'
'. . you see, even if she did this task, she would never have passed the Scrudu later. Best she die now…'
She couldn't hold the energy. No one could hold it. It clawed at her mind with talons of lightning, it roared and flailed and smashed against her. It bellowed and shrilled to be loosed. a moment longer… '
Her hand wanted to open and she knew that if she let go of the stone the force would fly outward with the motion, uncontrolled and explosive. Lamh Shabhala burned in her palm; she could feel its cold fury flaying the skin from muscles, the muscles from bone. It would tear her hand from her arm. She closed her left hand around the right.
'. . Good! Turn it inward. Inward…'
Jenna squeezed the cloch tighter, screaming against the resistance and the torture. She closed her eyes, crushing fingers together and shouting a wordless cry.
The sky went dark. The mage-lights vanished.
For a moment, Jenna gaped upward, back in her body again. Light flooded around her cupped, raised hands as if she were grasping the sun itself.
'Now,' O'Deoradhain said, his voice loud in the sudden silence. 'Let it
Jenna opened her hands.
A fountain of multicolored light erupted: from the cloch, from the scarred flesh of her arm, from her open mouth and eyes. It blossomed high above the valley, gathering like an impossible star for several breaths. Then it shattered, bursting apart into meteors that jetted outward along the energy lines of the other clochs na thintri, the star fading as the mete-ors flared and faded themselves, arcing into the distance and away.
There was the sound of peal upon peal of thunder, then their echoes rebounded from the hills and died in silence.
The valley was dark under a starlit sky, and the sparks lifting from their fire under the dolmen stone seemed pallid and cold. Jenna lifted the cloch that had fallen back around her neck-it burned cold, but it was dark. She marveled at her hands, that they were somehow whole and unblood-ied. The pain hit her then. She fell to her knees, crying out, and O'Deoradhain and Seancoim laid her down gently. 'Riata?' she called out.
'He's gone,' O'Deoradhain told her. 'At least I think so.'
'It hurts,' Jenna said simply.
I know. I'm sorry. But it's done. It's done, Jenna.
She nodded. Her right arm was stiffening now, the fingers curling into a useless fist, sharp twinges like tiny knives cutting through her chest. She cried, lying there, and let O’Deoradhain place his arm around her for the little comfort it brought her. A familiar smell cut through the smell of wood smoke: Seancoim crouched down by her, a bowl in his hand.
'Anduilleaf,' he said. 'This one time.'
Jenna started to reach for it. Her fingers grazed the edge of the bowl and then stopped. She shook her head. 'No,' she told the old man. 'I can bear this.'
What might have been a smile touched his lips beneath the tangle of gray beard. His blind eyes were flecked with firelight; Denmark flapped in from the night and landed on his shoulder. Seancoim dumped the contents of the bowl on the ground and scuffed at the dirt with his feet.
'You have indeed grown tonight, Jenna,' he said.
PART THREE: The Mad Holder
Chapter 31: Taking Leave
A DIRE wolf howled its worship to the moon goddess from the next hill. A white owl with a wingspan as wide as a person's outstretched arms swooped down from a nearby branch and lifted again with a rabbit clutched in its
