Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) Read Free

“To go? Mam, please, you can’t mean that . . .”
    Meriel saw confusion and embarrassment cross the Máister’s face, and his hands lifted in apology. “Jenna, I’m sorry. I thought you’d already told her—”
    Jenna . . . With the casual use of her mam’s name, Meriel realized how well the Máister must know her. There were very few people on Inish Thuaidh who could address her so familiarly. Jenna MacEagan was “Banrion MaEagan” or at the least “First Holder.” The only one she had heard call her mam “Jenna” had been Da or old Aithne MacBrádaigh, whose late husband had been the Rí before Meriel’s mam had become Banrion.
    “Told me what? ” Meriel asked.
    Her mam’s lips tightened, the lines on her forehead grew deeper. Jenna’s right hand, covered with the patterned white lines of old scars that echoed the lines of the mage-lights, brushed the silver cage of Lámh Shábhála and dropped again.
    “I meant to tell her,” Jenna said, speaking more to the Máister than to Meriel. “But she was away with Kyle all the summer and I’ve been otherwise occupied since then, as you know. . . .” She stopped. Took a long breath. Gold-brown eyes caught Meriel’s gaze. Meriel knew what she was going to say before she spoke, confirming the apprehension she’d felt ever since she saw the Máister in the room. “You’re going with Mundy—Maister Kirwan—to Inishfeirm, Meriel. I studied there, too, after I became First Holder—”
    “No.” Meriel spat out the word, interrupting her mam. Her head shook, her long and rather unruly strands of curly red hair swaying with the motion. She said it more loudly. “ No! I’m not going, Mam. I’m not interested in being a cloudmage.”
    “You need this schooling, Meriel,” Jenna answered. “It’s vital, for your own well-being.”
    “Do you hate me that much, Mam?” Meriel railed back. “Have you run out of cages to put me in or places to send me so you don’t have to deal with me? Am I in your way that much?”
    Bright spots of color flared high on her mam’s cheeks and Meriel thought she was going to spiral into one of her rages, but Máister Kirwan cleared his throat and they both looked at him. “Meriel, I remember your mam telling old Máister Cléurach fourteen years ago, in nearly the same tone, that she had absolutely no interest in anything he could teach her,” Máister Kirwan said, a chuckle of subdued amusement in his voice. “The poor man damned near died of apoplexy right there and then.” He did laugh then, a low rumble like soft thunder. “But your mam did study despite her protest, if somewhat grudgingly, and she learned. You should be an even better student: you have the gift from your mam’s side, and . . .” He paused, glancing at Jenna strangely. “. . . as strong a one from your da’s.”
    Her mam’s cheeks colored again, and Meriel wondered why the man would say that, in such an odd tone. Aye, her da also held a Cloch Mór, but he always said that it was only because his wife was the First Holder and he never seemed to enjoy talking about the times he’d used it. Jenna, on the other hand, was certainly snared in magic. Meriel had heard the tales of the Filleadh, the “Coming Back” of the mage-stones for which her mam had supposedly been responsible.
    Meriel had never been able to escape the history of her mam. In fact, her mam’s past seemed to surround Meriel everywhere she went, and people delighted in telling her again all the tales she’d heard too many times before. She heard them in long ballads sung by the Song-masters in the Weeping Hall: the Lay of Jenna Aoire and its endless verses. Or she heard them in the whispered tales from the succession of maidservants who had watched her through her childhood, or even from her current attendant Nainsi. “Oh, your mam the Banrion,” they’d say with trembling voices, “why, you wouldn’t believe what she did when she was but a young woman herself. She was