S Farrell - Holder of Lightning

"Here," he said. "One day, you will need this."

"What is it?" Jenna asked, sniffing.

"Brew it as a tea, and drink it, and you will forget

what is most painful to you," Seancoim told her. "There are some things that no one should remember, be it in song or tale or memory. When that time comes for you, you'll know."

Jenna glanced again at her mam and Mac Ard. "I don't think I want to remember today," she said, and the tears started again. Seancoim let the lid of the box close, sat on it, then drew her to him again. They sat, and Jenna stayed with him, crying for Kesh and her home, for her innocence and for her mam, letting Seancoim rock her until sleep finally came.

In the morning, Jenna found herself curled up on a pile of straw and old cloth close to the fire, which had dwindled to glowing coals. Seancoim's small leather bag was still clutched in her hand. No one else was in the cavern, and pale light filtered in through the entrance. Jenna got up, put the bag in her skirt with the stone, wrapped her coat around her, and padded outside.

Below her, the forest was wrapped in white mist and fog, the sun a hazy brightness just at the horizon. Seancoim was nowhere to be seen, but Mac Ard and Maeve were standing a few feet down the slope, talking with their heads close together. She started to go back inside, not wanting to interrupt them, but the rock under her foot tilted and fell back with a stony clunk. Maeve turned. "Jenna! Good morning, darling."

'"Morning, Mam. Where's Seancoim?"

"We're not certain," Maeve answered. "He was gone when we woke. He refilled the water bucket, though, and left some fresh berries on the shelf."

We're not certain. . Jenna nodded and found herself smiling a bit, hearing the plural. Mac Ard was smiling at her as well, teeth flashing behind the black beard, the smile slightly crooked on his face. She wanted to know what he was thinking, wanted to know that her mam would be safe with him, wanted to know that they could, perhaps, be a family.

But she knew there could be no answer to those questions. Her bladder ached in her belly. Jenna shrugged, turned, and left them. Later, having relieved herself behind a convenient screen of boulders, she came back to find that Seancoim had returned with Denmark on his shoulder.

". . riders on the High Road," he was saying to Mac Ard and Maeve. "They were tiarna-had to be, with those great war steeds, the heavy swords at their sides, and that fine clothing-but they weren’t showing colors on their cloca."

"Which way were they riding?" Mac Ard asked.

"That way," Seancoim answered, pointing south, away from where Knobtop would have been, had they been able to see it through the fog.

Mac Ard nodded, the lines of his face deepening and a scowl touching his lips. Jenna saw his right hand tighten around the hilt of his sword. "The Connachtans are looking for us well away from Ballintubber, then, and the High Road’s not safe. I’d hoped. ." His voice trailed off.

"There are other ways," Seancoim said.

"Other ways?"

Seancoim shrugged. The crow flapped its wings to keep its balance. "The forest you call Doire Coill goes away east and south from here, until it meets the tip of Lough Lar. A loop of the High Road passes close by again, as well, and it’s not far from there to Ath Iseal and the ford of the Duan-a few miles. No more. I can lead you there in a day and a half."

"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."