Read Holder of Lightning for Free Online

Jenna asked.
    Coelin shrugged. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. What did he say to you? What did he ask?”
    “He only asked whether I saw the lights, that’s all. I told him that I had, and described them for him.”
    “We all saw them,” Ellia said. “That’s nothing special. I could describe the lights for him just as easily, if that’s all he wants to know.” She tightened her arm around Coelin. Jenna looked at her, at Coelin. She tried to find a hint in his bright, grass-green eyes that he wanted her to stay, that her presence was special to him. Maybe if he’d spoken then, maybe if he’d moved away from Ellia, if he’d given her any small sign. . . .
    But he didn’t. He sat there, looking as handsome and charming as ever, with his long hair and his dancing eyes and his agile, long-fingered hands. Content. He smiled, but he smiled at Ellia, too. And he’d let either of us lift our skirts for him, too, with that same smile, that same contentment. The thought struck her with the force of truth, the way Aldwoman Pearce’s proclamations sometimes did when she scattered the prophecy bones from the bag she’d made from the skin of a bog body. There was the same sense of finality that Jenna heard in the rattling of the ivory twigs. You’re no more to him than any other comely young thing. His interest in you is mostly for the reflection he sees of himself in your eyes. He flirts with you because it is what he does. It means no more than that.
    “I’ll be going back to my table,” she said.
    “Stay,” he said. “I’ll be singing in a minute.”
    “And I’ll hear you just as fine from there,” Jenna answered. “Besides, you have Ellia to listen to you.”
    A trace of irritation deepened the fine lines around his eyes for a breath, then they smoothed again. His fingers flicked over the strings of his giotár discordantly. Ellia pulled him back toward her, and he laughed, turning his head away from Jenna.
    She went back to the table. Mac Ard was leaning toward Maeve, his arms on the table, his hands curled around a mug of the ale, and her mam was talking. “. . . Niall would go walking on Knobtop or the hills just to the east, or follow the Duán down to Lough Lár, or go wandering in the forests between here and Keelballi. But he always came back, was never away for more than a week, maybe two at the most. There was a wanderlust in him. Some people never seem satisfied where they are, and he was one. I never worried about it, or thought he was traipsing off with some lass. Once or twice a year, I’d find him filling a sack with bread and a few potatoes, and I’d know he would be going. Jenna—” Maeve glanced up as Jenna approached, and she smiled softly, “—she has some of that restlessness in her blood. Always wanting to go farther, see more. I don’t know what Niall was searching for, nor whether he ever found it. I doubt it, for he was wandering up to the end.”
    Mac Ard took a sip of the ale. “Did you ever ask him?”
    Maeve nodded. “That I did. Once. He told me . . .” She looked away, as if she could see Jenna’s da through the haze of pipe and peat smoke in the tavern. Jenna wondered what face she was seeing. “He told me that he came here because a voice had told him that his life’s dream might be here.” Meave’s eyes shimmered in the candlelight, and she blinked hard. “He said it must have been my voice he heard.”
    Coelin’s giotár sounded, a clear, high chord that cut through the low murmur of conversation in the bar. He’d moved over near the fire, Ellia sitting close to him and a mug of stout within reach. “What would you hear first?” he called out to the patrons.
    On any other night, half a dozen voices might have answered Coelin, but tonight there was silence. No one actually glanced back to Tiarna Mac Ard, but everyone waited to see if he would speak first.
    Mac Ard had turned in his chair to watch Coelin, and Jenna could see something akin to disgust, or