Holder of Lightning by S. L. Farrell Read Free Book Online

her words. Mam certainly seemed to trust the tiarna, and Jenna liked the way he spoke to her mam, and the way he treated the two of them. She could trust him, she felt. And yet . . .
    He might be angry to find that she’d lied. So might her mam. Jenna swore—an oath she’d once heard Thomas the Miller utter when he’d dropped a sack of flour on his foot.
    The ram, in the outbuilding, bleated a call of alarm. A few of the ewes also gave voice as Kesh’s ears went up and he ran barking to the door. Jenna followed, pulling the muddy boots back over her feet, guessing that a wolf or a pack of the wild pigs was prowling nearby, or that Old Stubborn had simply got himself stuck somewhere again. “What’s the matter with—” she began as she walked toward the pens.
    She stopped, looking toward Knobtop.
    Something sparked in the air above the peak: a flicker, a whisper of light. Then it was gone. But she’d seen true. She could still see the ghost of the light on the back of her eyes.
    “Kesh, come on,” she said.
    She started toward Knobtop, her boots sloshing through the muck.
    By the time she started walking up the mountain’s steep flanks, the sky flickered again with flowing streams and billows of colors, tossing multiple shadows behind her over the heather and rocks. Kesh barked at the mage-lights, lifting his snout up to the sky. They were brightening now, fuller and even more dazzling than they’d been the last time. By now, Jenna knew, someone in Ballintubber would have seen them. They’d be tumbling out of Tara’s, all of them, gawking. And Tiarna Mac Ard . . .
    She imagined him, running to the stable behind Tara’s, leaping on his brown steed and riding hard toward Knobtop . . .
    She frowned. Now that the lights had appeared again, she didn’t want to share them with him. They were hers. They had given her the stone; they had shown her the red-haired man.
    The stone . . . She could feel its smooth weight now, cold and pulsing in the woolen pocket. She pulled the stone out: the pebble glowed, shimmering with an echo of the sky above, the colors tinting her fingers as she held it. The mage-lights seemed to bend in the atmosphere directly above her, swirling like water, as if they sensed her presence below. Jenna lifted her hand, and the mage-lights coalesced, forming a funnel of sparkling hues above that danced and wriggled, lengthening and elongating. Jenna started to pull her hand away, but the funnel of mage-light had wrapped itself around her hand now, like a thread attached to the maelstrom in the sky above her. As she moved her hand, it stretched and swayed, a ball of glowing light attached to her wrist. She could feel the mage-lights, not hot but very, very cold, the chill creeping from wrist to elbow, to shoulder. Jenna tried to pull away, desperately this time, but they held her like another hand, gripping her shoulders, the cold seeping into her chest and covering her head.
    She swam in light. She closed her eyes, screaming in the bright silence, and she could still see the colors, melding and shifting.
    Ethereal voices called to her.
    A flash.
    A deafening peal of thunder.
    Blackness.
    Kesh was licking her face.
    Jenna rolled her head away, and the movement sent pain coursing through her neck and temples. Kesh whined as she shoved him away. “Get off,” she told him. “I’m fine.” She sat up, grimacing. “I hope so, anyway.”
    She was still on Knobtop, but the sky above was simply the sky, starlit between shreds of clouds slowly moving from the west. She looked down; she was holding the stone, and it throbbed like the blood in her head, pulsing cold but no longer shining. She was suddenly afraid of the pebble, and she started to throw it away, drawing her hand back.
    Stopping.
    The mage-lights came to you. They came to you, and the stone . . .
    She brought her hand back down to her lap.
    Kesh whined again, coming up to rub against her, then his head lifted, the ears going straight, his