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. .
’Now is not the time for the Scrudu. She must wait for that test until later, as I did. Lamh Shabhala chose her, and sent her to me." That was Riata, calm. "There is a reason it was her… " "What must I do?" Jenna asked them. Her voice was phosphorescence and glow. A hundred voices answered, a jumble of contradiction. Some were amused, some were hostile, some were sympathetic.
". . die!"
". . give up the clock while you can…"
". . hold onto yourself… "
She ignored them and listened for Riata’s voice. "Feel the presence of the other clocks…"
"I do." She could sense them all, scattered over the land yet tied to Lamh Shabhala with streamers of green-white energy. The channels led to the well within the cloch.
"Fill the cloch now," Riata told her, though other voices wailed laughter or warning. "Open it. ."
"You are the cloch," said another voice, fainter and paler: O'Deoradhain.
She imagined Lamh Shabhala transparent and without boundaries. Nothing happened. She drifted above the valley, snared in lambent splen-dor, but there was no change. She looked at her arm, saw light reflecting from it. A beam curled around her, and she willed it to enter her. Blue-green rays crawled the whorls of scars, and she gasped as the radiance entered in her and through her, surging into the cloch she held. Like a dam bursting under the pressure of a flood, the mage-lights suddenly whirled about her, following the path she had made, more and more of the energy filling her as she screamed in ecstasy and fear. Unrelenting, it poured inward. Lamh Shabhala was utterly full, too bright to gaze upon, shuddering and quivering in her hand as if it might break apart. And the pain came with the power: white, stabbing needles of it, driving deep into her flesh and her soul, a torment beyond anything she'd endured before.
The mage-lights were a thunderous cacophony into which she shouted uselessly. In a moment, she would be lost, swept away in currents that she could not control. She ached to release it, to simply let it pass through her, to end this.
"Hold onto the magic, Jenna!" The voice was Riata's or O'Deoradhain's or both. "You must hold onto it!" they shouted again, and she screamed back at them.
"I can't!"
"Jenna, Lamh Shabhala will open the way for the other clocks through you. It is too late now for anything else. The only choice to be made is whether you will use Lamh Shabhala or it you."
". . too young. . too weak. . she will die. ."
". . you see, even if she did this task, she would never have passed the Scrudu later. Best she die now…"
She couldn't hold the energy. No one could hold it. It clawed at her mind with talons of lightning, it roared and flailed and smashed against her. It bellowed and shrilled to be loosed. a moment longer… "
Her hand wanted to open and she knew that if she let go of the stone the force would fly outward with the motion, uncontrolled and explosive. Lamh Shabhala burned in her palm; she could feel its cold fury flaying the skin from muscles, the muscles from bone. It would tear her hand from her arm. She closed her left hand around the right.