"Jenna!" Her mam sank to the balcony floor in front of her, hands clutching Jenna’s shoulders. "Jenna, are you all right?" Jenna looked up, seeing her through the matrix of the stone. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She blinked, and Lamh Shabhala receded in her sight. The full agony of the mage-lights was beginning now, but she would not lose consciousness this time.
She was stronger. She could bear this.
"Help me up," she said, and felt Maeve and Mac Ard lift her to her feet. She stood, cradling her right arm to her. She shrugged the hands away, and took a few wobbling steps back into her room, with the tiarna and her mam close beside her. She sat on the edge of her bed, as her mam bustled about, shouting to the servant to bring boiling water and the anduilleaf paste. Mac Ard knelt in front of her, reaching out as if to touch her arm. Jenna drew back, scowling.
"It wanted me, not you," she told him. "It's mine now, and I won't let you have it. I won't ever let you have it."
She wasn't sure what she saw in his eyes then.
"I'm sorry, Padraic," she said. "I didn't mean that. It's just the pain."
He stared at her for long seconds, then he nodded. "I'm not a danger to you, Jenna," he said, his voice low enough so that only Jenna could hear him. "But there are others who will be. You'll find that out soon enough." He stood then.
"I leave her to you, Maeve," he said, more loudly. "I'll send for the healer. But I doubt that he has anything that will help her now."
PART TWO: Filleadh
Chapter 16: Lar Bhaile
IF Ath Iseal felt large and crowded to Jenna, Lar Bhaile was immense beyond comprehension. The city spread along the southeastern arm of Lough Lar, filling the hollows of the hills and rising on the green flanks of Goat Fell, a large, steep-sloped mountain that marked the end of the lough. Along the summit of Goat Fell ran the stone ramparts of the Ri's Keep, twin walls a hundred yards apart, opening into a wide courtyard where the keep itself
stood, towering high above the city. Behind those walls lived RI Gabair, whose birth name was Torin Mallaghan, in his court with the Riocha of Tuath Gabair gathered around him.
Jenna could well imagine how Tiarna Mac Ard could have seen the mage-lights over Ballintubber from those heights, flickering off the night-clad waters of the lough.
She looked up those heights now from the market in what was called Low Town along the lake’s shore, and they seemed impossibly high, a distant aerie of cut granite and limestone. Jenna judged that it had taken her at least a candle stripe and a half to ride down from the heights in Tiarna Mac Ard’s carriage; it would take two or more to wend their way back up the narrow road that wound over the face of Goat Fell.
But that was for later. Now was the time for business.
Jenna glanced at the trio of burly soldiers who accompanied her. Nei-ther the Ri nor Tiarna Mac Ard would allow her to leave the keep alone. At first, she hadn’t minded, not after the escape from Ballintubber. But in the intervening two months, the initial feeling of safety had been replaced by a sense of stifling confinement. She was never alone, not even in the rooms the Ri had arranged for her at the keep-there were always gardai stationed outside the door and servants waiting just out of sight for a summons. The cage in which she found herself was jeweled and golden, plush and comfortable, but it was nonetheless a cage.
"For your own safety," they told her. "For your protection."
But she knew it wasn’t for her protection. It was for the protection of the cloch.
Since she’d been in Lar Bhaile, the mage-lights had appeared here a dozen times. Each time, they had called her; each time, she had answered the call, letting their power fill the cloch she carried, now encased in a silver cage necklace around her neck, as it had been once for her da. Soon, she knew, the well within Lamh Shabhala would be filled to overflowing and the stone would open the way to the mage-lights for the other clochs. Everyone else knew it, also, for she saw that the Riocha were gathering here in Lar Bhaile, and many of them wore stones that had been in their families for generations, stones that were reputed to be clochs na thintri. They waited. They smiled at her the way a wolf might smile at an injured doe.
The Alds had been consulted, old records pored over, tales and legends recalled. They knew now that Jenna held Lamh Shabhala, and they also knew the pain the First Holder must endure when Lamh Shabhala opened the rest of the clochs na thintri to the mage-lights. They seemed content to let Jenna be the First Holder.
She thought most of them also imagined themselves the Second Holder, though at least Padraic Mac Ard didn’t seem to be among them. Wherever she went, there were eyes watching, and she knew that the gardai whis-pered back to the Riocha.
Jenna could sense that the gardai didn’t like where she’d brought them. They scowled, and kept their hands close to the hilts of their swords. The four of them were at the end of the market square; the stalls were small and dingy and the crowds thin.
Just beyond, a narrow lane moved south: Cat’s Alley, where the houses seemed to lean toward each other in a drunken embrace, leaving the cobbled lane in perpetual twilight. The central gutter was foul with black pools of stagnant water edged with filthy ice, and a frozen reek of decay and filth welled out into the square from the open mouth of the lane. Jenna grimaced: this was where Aoife, the servant she trusted most, had told her that she would find a man named du Val, who kept potions.
"Back in Ballintubber," she’d told Aoife, "we had a woman who gathered herbs and knew the old ways. You know, plants that can cure headaches, or can keep a young woman from getting pregnant, things like that. Where would I find someone like that here?"
Aoife had smiled knowingly at Jenna. "1 do know, mistress," she said. "Down in Cat’s Alley, no more than fifty strides from where it meets Low Town Market. You’ll see the sign on your right.
Jenna counted the steps, trying to avoid the worst of the muck on the ground. Before she reached forty, she saw the weathered board with faded letters: Du Val, Apothecary & Herbalist. She couldn’t read the words, but the tutors Tiarna Mac Ard had assigned to her had taught her the letters
and she could compare then with the note Aoife had given her. "Stay here," she told her escorts.
"Mistress, our orders. ."
She'd learned quickly how to deal with the objections of gardai. "Stay here, or I'll tell the Ri that you lost me in the market. Would you rather deal with that? I'll be careful. You can stay at the door and watch me, if you'd like." Her words emerged in puffs of white vapor; she wrapped her cloca tightly around her. "The sooner I'm done here, the sooner we can get back to the keep and some warmth."
They glanced at each other, then shrugged. Jenna pushed open the door. A bell jingled above. In the wedge of pale light that came in through the open door, she saw a small, windowless room. The walls were lined with shelves, all of them stuffed with vials of glass and crockery. Ahead of her was a desk piled high with more jars, and beyond into dim shadows were cabinets and cubbyholes. There was a fireplace to the right, but the ashes looked cold and dead. "Hello?" Jenna called, shivering.
Shadows moved in the darkness, and Jenna heard the sound of slow footsteps descending a staircase behind a jumble of boxes and crates. A short dwarf of a man peered out toward her, squinting, a hand over his eyebrows. "Shut the door," he barked. "Are you trying to blind me?"
"Shut it," Jenna told the garda, then when he hesitated, added more sharply, "do it!"
The door closed behind her, and as Jenna's eyes adjusted, she saw that some light filtered in through cracks in the doors and shutters, and that candles were lit here and there along the shelves. The little man shuffled forward to the desk with an odd, rolling gait. He was dressed in a dingy, shapeless woolen tunic and pants, held together with a simple rope. His face reminded her a bit of Seancoim's-the same bony ridge along the eyebrows, the flattened face. She wondered if there wasn't Bunus Muintir heritage in him somewhere. He glanced up and down at her appraisingly. "What can I do for you, Bantiarna?" he asked.