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with songs.”
    The patrons laughed and applauded (all but Ellia, Jenna noticed), and someone called out for another song, and Coelin started a reel: “The Cow Who Married the Pig,” everyone clapping along and laughing at the nonsensical lyrics. Mac Ard inclined his head to Maeve, nodding once in Jenna’s direction. “Those were her ancestors the boy sang of,” he said. “And your husband’s. A fierce and proud people, the Inishlanders. They never bowed to any king but their own, and they still don’t.” He sat back, then leaned forward again. “They also knew the mage-lights. Knew how to draw them down, knew how to store their power. Even then, in the last days of the Before, in the final flickering of the power and the cloud-mages. They say it’s in their blood. They say that if the mage-lights come again, when it’s time for the Filleadh, the mage-lights will first appear to someone of Inish Thuaidh.”
    Jenna saw Maeve glance toward her. She wondered if her mam had felt the same shiver that had just crept down her spine. “And are you thinking that my daughter and I had anything to do with this, Tiarna Mac Ard?” Maeve asked him.
    Mac Ard shrugged. “I don’t even know for certain that what we saw were mage-lights. They may have just been some accident of the sky, the moon reflecting from ice in the clouds, perhaps. But . . .” He paused, listening to Coelin’s singing before turning back to Maeve and Jenna. “I told you that when I saw them, I wanted to come here. And I . . . I have a touch of the Inish blood in me.”

4
    The Fire Returns
    J ENNA left before the clock-candle reached the next stripe: as Coelin sang a reel, then a love song; as Mac Ard related to Maeve the long story of his great-great-mam from Inish Thuaidh (who, Jenna learned, fell in love with a tiarna from Dathúil in Tuath Airgialla, who would become Mac Ard’s great-great-da. There was more, but Jenna became lost in the blizzard of names.) Maeve seemed strangely interested in the intricacies of the Mac Ard genealogy and asked several questions, but Jenna was bored. “I’m going back home, Mam,” she said. “You stay if you like. I’ll check on Kesh and the sheep.”
    Her mam looked concerned for a moment, then she glanced at Ellia, who was leaning as close to Coelin as she could without actually touching him. She smiled gently at Jenna. “Go on, then,” she told Jenna. “I’ll be along soon.”
    It was no longer raining at all, and the clouds had mostly cleared away, though the ground was still wet and muddy. Her boots were caked and heavy by the time she reached the cottage. Kesh came barking up to her as she approached. Jenna took off her boots, picked up a few cuttings of peat from the bucket inside the door, and coaxed the banked fire back into life until the chill left the room. Kesh padded after her as she went from the main room to their tiny bedroom and sat on the edge of the straw-filled mattress. She stared at the mud-daubed hole where the stone lay hidden. “They say it’s in their blood,” Tiarna Mac Ard had said. “When I saw them, I wanted to go there. . .”
    Jenna dropped to her knees in front of the hole. She picked at the dried mud with her fingernails until she could see the stone. Carefully, she pried it loose and held it in her open palm. So oddly plain, it was, yet . . .
    It was cold again. As cold as the night she’d held it in her hand on Knobtop. Jenna gasped, thrust the stone into the pocket of her skirt, and left the bedroom.
    She sat in front of the peat fire for a few minutes, her arms around herself. Kesh lay at her feet, looking up at her quizzically from time to time, as if he sensed that Jenna’s thoughts were in turmoil. She wondered whether she should go back to Tara’s and show the stone to Mac Ard, tell him everything that had happened on Knobtop. It would feel good to tell the truth—she knew that; she could feel the lie boiling inside, festering and begging for the lance of