longer hear the animals: the grunt of the deer, the occasional howl of a wolf, the rustlings and chirps of the night birds. Here, there were other sounds: leafy rustlings, the groan of shifting wood, the sibilant breath of leaves that sounded almost like words. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and she could see that she and Seancoim were surrounded by gigantic old oaks with gnarled, twisted branches and great trunks that it would take three men to encircle. They loomed over the two, and Denmark stayed on Seancoim's shoulder rather than roosting in any of these branches.
The trees spoke to each other. Jenna could hear them, could feel them. They were aware; they knew she was there. Branches moved and swayed though there was no wind, one limb sweeping down to wrap about Jenna's right arm. She resisted the temptation to brush away the woody fin-gers, the leafy touch, and a few moments later it uncurled and swept away. 'Can you talk to them, Seancoim?' she asked, her voice a hushed whisper. It seemed sacrilegious to speak loudly here.
'No,' he answered, his voice as quiet as hers. 'They're the Seanoir, the Eldest, and their language is older than even the Bunus Muintir, nor do they experience life as we do. But this place is one of the many hearts of Doire Coill. These trees were planted by the Seed-Daughter herself when she gave life to the land, and they have been here since
the beginning, thousands and thousands of years. Here, feel. .' Seancoim took Jenna’s hand and placed it on the veined, craggy surface of the nearest trunk. She felt nothing for a moment, then there was a throb like the pulsing of blood; a few breaths later, another followed. 'That’s the heartbeat of the land itself,' Seancoim said. 'Slow and mighty and eternal, moving through their limbs.'
Jenna kept her hand there, feeling the long, unhurried beats, her own breath slowing and calming with the touch. 'Seancoim, I never. .' She wanted to stay here forever, feeling this. There was a sorcery to the trees, an insistent lethargy, and she remembered. 'When I was here before. .'
'Aye, it was their call you heard,' Seancoim told her. 'And if the Old Ones here wished it, you would remain snared in their spell until your body died of thirst and hunger. Look around you, Jenna. Look around you with your eyes open.'
'My eyes are open…' she started to say, then blinked. For the first time, she noticed that there were gleams of moonlit white in the grassy earth of the grove. She bent down to look and straightened with a stifled cry: a skull leered back at her, stalks of grass climbing through vacant eye sockets, the jaw detached and nearly lost alongside. There were dozens of skeletons in and around the tree trunks, she saw now: some human, some animal.
'The sun feeds their leaves, the rain slakes their thirst, and those who come here and are trapped by their songs nourish the earth in which their roots dig,' Seancoim said. 'This is where, when it’s time, I’ll come, too, on my own and by my own choice.' Jenna continued to stare. She could smell the death now: the ripe pungency of rotting flesh. Some of the bodies were new, and the clothes they wore were dyed green and brown.
She should have been horrified. But she felt the throbbing of the trees and the earth and realized that this was as it should be, that the Seanoir fed on life in the same way Jenna fed on life. She ate the meat of animals that had once been alive, and soaked up their juices with bread from the wheat that had waved in fields under the sun a month before. This was simply another part of the greater cycle in which they were all caught There was no horror here. No malevolence, no evil. The trees simply did as their nature demanded. If they killed,
it was not out of hatred, but because their view of the world was far longer and broader than that of the races whose lives were impossibly fleeting.
A branch came down; it lifted the cloch at Jenna's neck and let it drop again. 'They know Lamh Shabhala,' Seancoim said. 'It is nearly as old as they are. They know it lives again.' He went up to the largest of the trees and lifted his hand. A branch above wriggled, and a large acorn dropped into his palm. 'Here,' he told Jenna. He folded the nut in her left hand, closing her fingers around the acorn and putting his own leathery hands over hers. 'For the Seanoir, the mage-lights signal a time of growing. Even the seasons themselves are too fast for them. The lights are the manifesta-tion of a burgeoning centuries-long spring and summer for them, and this is their seed. Take this with you when you go, and plant this where you find your new home. Then you will always have part of Doire Coill with you. Make a new place for them.'
Moonlight shimmered through moving branches, and the leaves spoke their words. Jenna nodded to the Seanoir, the ancient oaks of Doire Coill.
'I will,' she said. 'And I'll always remember.'
They left that morning before the sun rose, their faces toward the constel-lation of the Badger, whose snout always points north. They said little besides idle talk of the weather, and if O'Deoradhain noticed that Jenna paralleled the High Road and that Knobtop crept slowly closer to them as the sun rose behind a wall of gray clouds, he said nothing. By evening, they were close to Ballintubber, with Knobtop rising high on their right hand, its bare stony summit still in sunlight even though the marshes on either side of the road were wrapped in shadow. As they approached the Bog Bridge, O'Deoradhain placed his hand on Jenna's arm. 'Are you sure?' he asked.
'I need to see this.'
He looked as if he were about to argue, but he swallowed the words and shrugged. 'Then let's hurry, before we're walking in the dark.'
A few hundred strides beyond the bridge, they came to the lane which led to Jenna's home. The lane was overgrown, the grass high where once the sheep had kept it cropped close and the hay wagon had worn ruts in the earth. Jenna turned into the
lane, hurrying now down the familiar path around the bend she recalled so well. She wasn’t certain what she expected to see: perhaps the house as it had once been, with her mam at the door and Kesh barking as he ran out toward her, and smoke curling from the chimney.
Instead, there was ruin. The house had mostly returned to earth. Only a roofless corner remained, overgrown with vines and brush. Where the barn had been there was only a mound. She walked forward with a stum-bling gait: there was the door stone, worn down in the center from boots and rain, but it sat in the midst of weeds, the door itself only a few blackened boards half-buried in sod and grass. The chimney had col-lapsed, but the hearth was still there, blackened from the fire that had destroyed the house, and her mam’s cooking pot, rusted and broken, lay on its side nearby.
Here was where she had slept and laughed and lived, but it was only a ghost now. The bones of a dead existence. The silence here was the silence of a grave.
'I’m sorry,' O’Deoradhain said. Jenna started at the sound of his voice; lost in reverie, she hadn’t heard his approach. 'I can imagine it looked beautiful, once.'
She nodded. 'Mam always had flowers on the windowsill, red and blue and yellow, and I knew every stone and crack in the walls. .'A sob shook her shoulders, and she felt O’Deoradhain’s arms go around her. His touch dried the tears, searing them with anger. She shrugged his embrace away, her hands flailing. 'Get off me!' she shouted at him, and he backed away, hands wide and open.
'I’m sorry, Holder,' he said.
Jenna’s right hand went automatically to Lamh Shabhala, touching the stone. A faint glimmer of light shone between her fingers, turning them blood-red. 'You don’t ever touch me. Do you understand?'
He nodded. His face was solemn, but there was something in his pale green eyes she could not read, a wounding caused by her words. He turned away and dropped his pack from his shoulders as Jenna slowly relaxed.
She let go of the cloch and its light faded. Her arm
ached, as if in memory of how Lamh Shabhala had awakened here, and she wished again-fleetingly-that Seancoim had put anduilleaf in her pack. 'We might as well camp here tonight,' she said, trying to sound as if the confrontation had never happened and knowing she fooled neither of them. 'It's obvious no one's come here since… ' She stopped, and genuine wonder filled her voice. 'Shh! What's that?'
What?' O'Deoradhain glanced in the direction Jenna was pointing.
Well off in the field where Old Stubborn and his herd used to graze, there was movement: pairs of pale green lights gleaming in the twilight, like glowing eyes. There seemed to be hundreds of them, just above the level of the tall grass, shifting and moving about, blinking occasionally. And they spoke like a crowd of people gathered together: a low, murmuring conversation that raised goose bumps on Jenna's arms. There were words in their discussion, she was certain, then-distinctly-a horn blew a shrill glissando. The lights went out as one, and a wind rose from the field and swept past them and up the lane. In the twilight, Jenna could glimpse half-seen shapes and feel ghostly hands brushing against her. The horn sounded again: fainter and more distant, heading in the direction
