S Farrell - Holder of Lightning

Jenna sank down with her back against one of the standing stones, not caring that the ground was soaked and muddy. "Now what?" she asked.

"We wait," Seancoim answered.

"Here?" Jenna spat.

"Here, or in Riata’s cairn."

"Here," O’Deoradhain said. He cast a look at the blackness beyond the stones where Denmark

roosted, and shivered. "Graves aren't for the living."

"Riata isn't quite dead," Seancoim told him.

"Then that's even worse."

"Can we at least have a fire?" Jenna asked. "I'm cold through."

O'Deoradhain gathered together what kindling he could find and pulled his tinderbox from his pack, but the spark wouldn't catch despite repeated efforts. "It's too damp," he said finally. Jenna nodded miserably, and Seancoim hunkered down in front of the nest of kindling O'Deoradhain had built. He rubbed his hands together several times, chanting words that Jenna could not understand. He picked up O'Deoradhain's flint and struck it. A blue flame shot out, startling Jenna, and the kindling began to crackle. O'Deoradhain chuckled. "I'm beginning to think that I was lucky you only hit me on the head," he said to Seancoim.

Seancoim's grizzled, ancient face grinned back at him as he warmed his hands over the flames. "That you were, young man."

They stayed there under the dolmen as the sun lowered itself beyond the lip of the valley and the valley grew darker under the overcast sky. The rain stopped before sunset; as night fell they began to glimpse stars between the thinning clouds.

Seancoim and O'Deoradhain talked as they waited, but Jenna said little, sitting on the ground with her knees drawn up and her right arm cradled against her. She stroked Lamh Shabhala from time to time. The cloch seemed almost restless, its image throbbing in her head, filling her vision with bright sparks. There was a tension in the air itself like the drone of some sepulchral pipe, so low that she couldn't quite hear it but only feel the sound, rumbling just below the threshold of perception.

A finger of light appeared above them, blue outlined in gold, wavering and brightening so that they saw the shadow of the dolmen sway on the ground in response. Jenna rose to her feet.

"So it is to be tonight… "

The voice spoke in her head, not in her ears: a resonant, warm baritone. The others looked up as well, as if they'd also heard. "Riata?" Jenna glanced toward the entrance to his tomb. There was a wavering in the dimness, a mist that formed itself

into a man’s shape as she watched. "Do you remember me?"

She felt the now-familiar touch of another Holder’s mind on her own, this one more powerful than most, strong enough so that she could not shut him out as he prowled her thoughts and her memories. The spectral figure of the ancient Bunus Holder drifted toward her. Jenna was vaguely aware of the others watching, Seancoim placidly silent, O’Deoradhain with shocked apprehension. "Ahh," Riata sighed. "Jenna. You are the First who came to me once before." More mage-lights had appeared in the sky, brighter and more brilliantly colored than Jenna had seen in previous displays. The largest manifestation was directly overhead, but the mage-lights flickered all the way to the horizon. The entire valley was illumi-nated, as if a thousand fires burned above. Riata’s indistinct face glanced up to them. "Aye," he said. "Tonight."

Jenna clutched the cloch na thintri. The fingers of her right hand, as if warmed by the glare of the mage-lights, moved easily now and closed around the stone. Lamh Shabhala was frigid in her palm, glowing in re-sponse to the swaying, dancing power above it. Jenna could sense the cloch yearning like a live thing, wanting her to open it, to fill it. The feeling was so urgent and compulsive that it frightened Jenna.

"Lamh Shabhala craves the power as you crave the anduilleaf," Riata murmured in her head. "You must control Lamh Shabhala as you must control yourself, or it will destroy you utterly when it consumes the mage-lights this night and sets free the other clochs na thintri."

Riata’s words filled Jenna with dread. Her breath came fast and shallow; she could feel her heart racing. "I can’t do it," she gasped.

"You can. I will help you."

"As will I," O’Deoradhain said. He was beside her now. His hand touched Jenna’s shoulder, and she shrugged it away.

"You want me to fail," she spat at him. "Then you’ll take Lamh Shabhala."

"Aye, I would if that happened," he told her. His pale emerald eyes regarded her calmly. "But your failure isn’t what I want. Not any longer. You can

believe me or not, Jenna, but I will help you. I can help you. This is what I was trained to do."

"Listen to him," Riata husked. "Use the cloch. See the truth even if you want to deny it."

"You swear that?" Jenna asked O'Deoradhain, and she let the barest hint of the cloch's strength waft outward. Shaping it to her task was like holding one of the piglets back in their farm in Ballintubber: it wriggled, it squirmed to be away, and she could control it only with difficulty.

"I do swear it," O'Deoradhain answered, and the truth in the words reverberated like the sound of a bronze bell.

"Then what do I do?" Jenna asked.

"Start as you always have. Open the cloch to the lights."

Jenna let the image of Lamh Shabhala fill her mind: the crystalline interstices; the jeweled valleys and hills; the interior landscape of spar-kling energy. Above, the sky responded, a surge of pure white light that was born directly above Jenna and rippled outward in bright spectral rings. The mage-lights flamed, the clouds were driven away as if by hurri-cane winds.

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. .