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

“Tell me the truth, Jenna. I swear I mean you and your mam no harm. I swear it.”
    He waited, looking at Jenna, and she could feel her hand trembling around the wooden mug. She set it down on the table, staring down at the steaming brew without really seeing it. She was trembling, her hands shaking as they rested on the rough oaken tabletop.
    “I was there,” she said to the mug. “The lights, they were so . . . bright and the colors were so deep, all around me . . .” She lifted her head, looking from Mac Ard to her mam, shimmering in the salt water that suddenly filled her eyes. “I don’t understand why this is happening,” she said, sniffing and trying to keep back the tears. “I don’t know why it keeps happening to me. I don’t want it, didn’t ask for it. I don’t know anything. ” The stone burned cold against her thigh through the woolen fabric. “I . . .” She started to tell them the rest, how the mage-lights had glowed in the stone, how the power had arced from it, how the pebble had seemed to draw the mage-lights tonight, all of it. But she saw the eagerness in Mac Ard’s face, the way he leaned forward intently as she spoke of the lights, and she stopped herself. You don’t know him, not really. The stone was your gift, not his. The voice in her head almost seemed to be someone else’s. “There isn’t anything else to tell you, Tiarna,” she said, sniffing. “I’m sorry.”
    Disappointment etched itself in the set of his mouth, and she realized that the man was genuinely puzzled. He shook his head. “Then we wait, and we watch,” he said. He turned to Maeve. “I’ll stay at Tara’s for another day, at least, and we’ll see. The mage-lights may come again tomorrow night. If they do, if they call Jenna, I’ll go up there with her. If that’s acceptable to you, Widow Aoire.”
    Maeve lifted her chin. “She’s my daughter. I’ll be with her, too, Tiarna Mac Ard.”
    He might have smiled. Maeve might have smiled back.
    Mac Ard brushed at his clóca, adjusting the silver brooch at the right shoulder. “Good night to you both, then,” he said. He gave a swift bow to Maeve, and left.

5
    Attack on the Village
    T HE night sky stayed dark the next night. Tiarna Mac Ard remained at Tara’s, coming to Jenna’s house that evening and escorting the two of them back to the tavern, where they listened to Coelin with an eye on the window that showed Knobtop above the trees.
    But it remained simply night outside. Nothing more.
    The next day broke with a heavy mist rolling in from the west, a gray wall that hid sun and sky and laid a sheen of moisture over the village. The mist beaded on the wool of the sheep as Jenna and Kesh herded them to the field behind the cottage. Kesh was acting strangely; he kept lifting his head and barking at something unseen, but finally they got the last straggler through. Jenna walked the field perimeter once, checking the stone fence her father had built, then calling Kesh—still barking at nothing—and closing the gate.
    She smelled it then in the air, over the distinctive tang of smoldering peat from their own fire and those in the village: the odor of woodsmoke and burning thatch. Jenna frowned, surveying the landscape. There was a smear of darker gray beyond the trees lining the field, and under it, a tinge of glowing red. “Mam!” she called. “I think there’s a fire in the village.”
    Maeve came from the cottage, wrapping a shawl over her head. “Look,” Jenna said, pointing. Her mam squinted into the damp air, into the gray, dim distance.
    “Come on,” she said. “They may need help . . .”
    They didn’t get as far as the High Road. They heard the sound of a galloping horse racing toward them down the rutted dirt lane, and Tiarna Mac Ard came hurtling around the bend, his hair blowing and his clóca billowing behind him. He pulled Conhal to a mud-tossing halt in front of them, dismounting in a sudden leap.
    “Tiarna Mac Ard—” Maeve