"What would happen to Lamh Shabhala after I'm gone isn't my concern, "Jenna answered. "If I fail, I fail."
"Then you have a death wish."
"I'm not afraid of death," Jenna answered. "I've seen too much of it"
Loman's eyes narrowed at that. "Maybe not such a child, now " he muttered. "But you've chosen a poor adviser if you're listening to Seancoim." His gaze went back to Seancoim. "You think she can survive Scrudu, Crow-Eye? You can look at this stripling and believe that?"
"Riata believes it," Seancoim answered.
Loman made a sound like a kettle too long on the fire. "Riata's long dead."
"His body, aye, but his spirit is still restless and he has spoken to Jenna. He seems. . impressed by her."
Loman snorted again. "The Daoine are a weak race. They conquered us only because they were so many and we were so few. They conquered us because their swords were iron and ours were bronze. But even with steel and numbers, they still wouldn't have won had our clochs na thintri not been decades asleep when they came." One shoulder rose and fell. "We would have pushed the Daoine back to Ceile Mhor and beyond if the clochs had been awake. But go ahead, Crow-Eye. Let her try. I think Toryn would be a good Holder, afterward."
The youth grinned at that, cocking his head appraisingly toward Jenna. "It’s about time that Lamh Shabhala came home to Thall Coill," he said. His voice was thick and low, blurred with the Bunus Muintir accent, a voice of confidence and certainty. "I’ll be happy to escort the two of you to Bethiochnead, and afterward. ." He grinned again, showing his teeth. "Lamh Shabhala will come back to us, and perhaps we can obtain a few of the Cloch Mor, then who knows? It may be that the Bunus Muintir win emerge from our forests and hills and take back what was once ours, an age ago." Dreams flashed in his eyes, widening his smile.
"Come with me, Holder," he said. "Let me show you Thall Coill.
It was Toryn who led Jenna and Seancoim through the trackless forest, Loman refusing to accompany them. "I’ve no interest in watching J° Daoine die," he told Seancoim. "That’s your task, since you brought here. And I’m too old to want Lamh Shabhala." The forest…
A spine-backed form slunk away through the snarl of seedlings to their right. A patch of moonlight struck blue highlights from a whorled shell taller than Jenna, glimpsed in a meadow bordering the shoulder of a black stream. The smell of sulfur and rotting meat wafted from a fissure bound in vines. Air colder than winter or the heights of the mountains spread from a pond whose glowing water was the color of buttermilk fresh from a churn. Calls and hoots and shrill cries erupted from the darkness around them.
And the tree-song. . Jenna heard the call of the ancient oaks, the green life in the most ancient and lost hollows of Thall Coill, a compelling whisper that rustled the leaves above them, that caused the oaks to bend down with many-limbed branches, that hushed the call of the mage-lights nearly invisible under the canopy of the forest. Thall Coill had a stronger, more insistent voice than Doire Coill, a call that echoed down in the very fibers of Jenna’s being. The voice of the forest awoke primitive echoes, as if pulling at impossibly ancient ties between the trees and her most distant ancestors. More than once, Jenna found herself straying from the path, wandering away as Seancoim and Toryn continued on. The first time it happened, Seancoim called to her, breaking the spell, and Toryn laughed. "She’s weak," he told Seancoim. "The Old Ones would snare her, and we’d find her bones years later, sitting against their trunks."
Jenna flushed, embarrassed that she could succumb to the trees' sing-ing, but she noticed as Toryn turned away that there were tufts of moss in his ears, and that Toryn pushed them in deeper as he strode away.
You're not the only one. . Seancoim nodded to her, with a quick smile; he had noticed as well. "Everything beautiful is also dangerous," he said to her before turning to stump along after Toryn.
As Jenna followed along behind them, she tried to see the forest with Seancoim's eyes. It was beautiful in its way, she had to admit. The oaks, their massive trunks wound with vines of mistletoe, with girths so wide that two people could not have encircled them with their hands, were survivors from when Thall Coill, Doire Coill, and the few other old growth forests had dominated all of Talamh An Ghlas, penetrating far into Ceile Mhor and even to the great continent of Thall Mor-roinn. The Daoine were still in their homelands then; the Bunus Muintir were nothing but a series of family-based clans scratching out a subsistence exis-tence under the trees, their culture just starting to coalesce.
Walking here, Jenna felt as the first peoples must have felt: insignificant arid small in the midst of this ancient life. The forest was a single creature, a vast and intricate organism in whose bowels she walked, and within its body was mystery, danger, and, aye, great beauty. If the forest desired, it could crush her with its sheer weight. It tolerated her because she was small to do it any real harm.
She understood for the first time why the Bunus Muintir could worship a goddess whose earthly form was an oak tree.
They walked for hours, Toryn (deliberately, Jenna was certain) keeping a quick pace that made it difficult for Seancoim to stay with him. Jenna remained at Seancoim's side; Toryn would at times be so far ahead of them that he was barely visible in the moonlight filtering down through the trees. Each time, Seancoim sent Denmark angrily flying to the young man, screeching at him from a nearby branch until he stopped to wait hands on hips, while they caught up with him again. And each time, as they approached, he would start off once more without a word.
Jenna had decided she despised the man by the time false dawn tinted the horizon with rose and ocher.
The call of the Old Ones had faded; Jenna could hear the rhythmic pulse of the sea crashing against rock. The land was rising steeply under them, the trees thinning quickly until they gave way entirely to a grassy swath. Here, the bones of the land showed through the dirt: furrowed lines of bare gray limestone, the cracks sprouting a few weeds clinging to the thin film of earth at the bottom. At the top of the rise, the land simply stopped at a sheer cliff while-nearly a hundred feet below-waves gnawed at the feet of the island. The wind blew in steadily, cold and misty. And there. . where in her dream of Peria and Tadhg had been only the sense of a presence that would not allow itself to be seen.
It might have been a huge cat or, perhaps, a dragon. The statue stood a few strides from the cliff edge, gazing out to sea as if it were protecting the forest or the island from unseen invaders. The statue was carved of jet-black stone, glassy and volcanic in appearance and unlike any rock Jenna had seen in the area. The head was perched thirty feet above them on a massive four-legged body, sitting down on its haunches with its tail wrapping around its left side and curling away to end abruptly at the cliff edge. Along the sloping back, there were two ridges where wings might once have been, though there was no evidence of them having tumbled to the ground around them. The monument’s features were blurred by the weight of centuries, polished by wind and sand, eroded by rain until all that remained was the obscured outline of what the creature had once been.
"Bethiochnead," Seancoim said as Jenna gazed up at the creature, t was here when we Bunus Muintir came. No one knows who erected this or exactly what it is."
"The Greatness Herself put Bethiochnead here for the Bunus Muintir to find," Toryn said from the side of the statue. "It still holds Her power."
Seancoim shrugged. "That’s what some believe, aye," he told Jenna. He glanced at Toryn. "But not all. There may have been other races here before the Bunus and Daoine, and they may have made this. Some think it was the Creneach who sculpted it, that this is a representation of one of their gods.