S Farrell - Holder of Lightning

A while later, with the flock settled, her clothing changed and the worst of the mud brushed away from her coat and from her hands, and Kesh (and herself) fed, they walked down the lane to the High Road, then north a bit to Tara’s, the dirt cold enough to crunch under their boots, the moon frosted silver above. The tavern’s windows were beckoning rec-tangles of yellow, and the air inside was warm with the fire and the heat of bodies. On any given night, Tara's was busy, with Tara herself, gray-haired and large, behind the bar and pulling the taps for stout and ale. Often enough, Coelin would be there, playing his fiddle or giotar and singing, and maybe another musician or two would join him and later someone would start dancing, or everyone would sing along and the sound would echo down the single lane of the village and out into the night air.

Jenna liked to listen to Coelin, who was three years older. Coelin had apprenticed under Songmaster Curragh, dead of a bloody cough during the bad winter three years ago. Jenna thought Coelin handsome, with his shock of unruly brown hair, his easy smile that touched every muscle in his face, and those large hands that spidered easily over his instrument land which, aye, she sometimes imagined running over her body). She thought Coelin liked her, as well. His green eyes often found her when he was singing, and he would smile.

"You're too young for him," Mam had said one night when she noticed Jenna smiling back. "The boy's twenty. Look at the young women around him, girl, smiling and preening and laughing. Half of them have already lifted their skirts for him, I'll wager, and one day soon one of them will miss her bleeding and pop up big and there'll be a wedding. You'd be a piece of blackberry pie to him, Jenna, sweet and luscious, devoured in one sitting and as quickly forgotten. Look if you want, and dream, but that's all you should do."

Tonight, Coelin wasn't playing, though Jenna thought that half of Ballintubber must be pressed inside the tavern. Coelin sat in his usual corner, his instruments still in their cases. Aldwoman Pearce stood up alongside the huge fireplace across from the bar, a mug of brown stout close at hand, and everyone staring at her furrowed, apple-shaped face."… in the Before, the sky would be alive with mage-lights, four nights out of the seven," she was saying in her trembling voice that always reminded Jenna of the sound of a rasp against wood. When Jenna and Maeve walked in, she stopped, watching them as they sidled along the back of the crowd. Cataract-whitened eyes glittered under overhanging, gray-hedged brows, and she took a long sip of the stout's brown foam. Aldwoman Pearce was Ald-the Eldest-in Ballintubber, over nine double-hands of years old. "I've buried everyone born before me and many after," she often said. "And I’ll bury more before I go. I’m too old and mean and tough for the black haunts to eat my soul." Aldwoman Pearce knew all the tales, and if she changed them from time to time as suited the occasion, no one dared to contradict her.

Aldwoman Pearce set the glass down on the mantel again with a sharp clack that made half the people jump up, startled. The noise also narrowed Tara’s eyes where she stood behind the bar-mugs were expensive and chipped ones were already too common. Aldwoman Pearce didn’t notice Tara’s unspoken admonition; her gaze was still on Maeve and Jenna.

"In the Before, when the bones of the land were still alive, mage-lights often filled the sky," Aldwoman Pearce declared, looking back at the oth-ers. "They were brighter and more colorful than those we saw tonight, and the cloudmages would call down the power in them and use it to war against each other. In the Before, magic lived in the sky, and when the sky became dark again, as it has stayed ever since for hands upon hands of generations, the cloudmages all died and their arts were lost."

"We’ve all heard that story a thousand times before," someone called out. The voice sounded like Thomas the Miller, who lived at the north end of the village, but Jenna, craning her head to see over the crowd, couldn’t be sure. "Then what was that we saw tonight? I saw my shadow, near as sharp as in the sun. I could have read a book by it."

"Aye, that you could, if you owned a book and if you could read at all," One Hand Bailey called out, and everyone laughed. Jenna’s mam had a book, a fine old thing with thick pages of yellow paper and gray-black printing that looked more perfect than any hand could have written. Thomas claimed he could read and Jenna’s mam had shown him their book once, but he claimed it must have been written in some other lan-guage, because he couldn’t read it all. Sometimes Thomas read stories from the book bound in green leather that Erin the Healer owned, but Jenna wasn’t alone in wondering whether Thomas simply made up the things he supposedly read.

"Tonight we saw the signs of the Filleadh," Aldwoman Pearce declared. "The first whisper that the bones of the land have stirred and will walk

again, that what was Before will be Now. A hint, perhaps-" She stopped and glanced at Jenna's mam again; a few of the others craning their necks to look back as well. "-that things that were hidden will be found again."

Some of the people muttered and nodded, but Thomas guffawed. "That's nonsense, Aldwoman.

The Before is Before, and the bones of the land are dead forever."

"The things I know aren't written in any of your books, Thomas Miller," the Ald sneered, tearing her hard gaze away from Maeve. "I know because my great-mam and great-da told me, and their parents told them, and so on back to the Before. I know because I hold history in my gray head, and because I listened. I know because my old bones feel it, and if you had a lick of sense in your head, you'd know it, too."

Thomas snorted, but said nothing. Aldwoman Pearce looked around the room, turning slowly, and again she fixed on Maeve. "What do you say, Maeve Aoire?"

Jenna felt more than saw her mam shrug. "I'm sure I don't know," she answered.

The Ald sniffed. "This is a portent, I tell you," she said ominously. "And if they saw the lights all the way in Dun Laoghaire, the Riocha will be like a nest of hornets hit with a stick, and will be buzzing all around the whole of Talamh an Ghlas. The R1 Gabair will be sending his emissaries here soon, because we all saw that the lights were close and within his lands." With that, Aldwoman Pearce drained her stout in one long swallow and called for more, and everyone began talking at once.

By the time Tara's clock-candle had burned down another stripe, Jenna was certain that no one in the tavern really knew what the lights had been at all, though it certainly made for a profitable evening for Tara-talking is thirsty work, as the old saying goes, and everyone wanted to give their impression of what they'd seen. Jenna slipped outside to escape the heat and the increasingly wild speculation, though Maeve was listening in-tently. Jenna shook her head as the closing door softened the din of a dozen conversations. She leaned against the drystone wall of the tavern, looking up at the crescent moon and the stars, gleaming and twinkling as if their stately transit of the sky had never been disturbed.

She smelled the odor of the pipe a moment before she heard the voice and saw the glowing red circle at the corner of the tavern. "They’ll be going for another stripe, at least."

"Aye," Jenna answered, "and they’ll all be complaining of it in the morning."

Laughter followed that remark, and Coelin stepped out from the side of the tavern, his form outlined in the glow from the tavern’s window. He took a puff on the pipe, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. "You saw it, too?"

She nodded. "I was up on Knobtop, still, when the lights came. With our sheep."

"Then you saw it well, since it looked as if the lights were flaring all around old Knobtop. So what do you think it was?"