Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

boy. We’ll see how long the infatuation lasts when they’re apart. I’ll wager it won’t be long. Some pretty lass will smile at him, and suddenly what’s in front of him will be more important than what’s gone.”
    Jenna blinked. Mundy saw her start to protest—as any mam might protest such an offhand dismissal of her daughter’s charms—then close her mouth again. “And the clochmion? Treoraí’s Heart?”
    Mundy reached into his pocket and brought out the fragment of crystal he’d had on the beach. “I didn’t give it to her,” he told Jenna. “I know you asked me to, but she isn’t ready, not even for a clochmion.” He paused, his fingers still closed around the stone. “She may never be ready, Jenna,” he said. “Not for what you carry. I think that’s something you have to consider when you’re ready to pass it on.”
    “She doesn’t need to be ready,” Jenna answered sharply. “I wasn’t prepared for what was given me, but I struggled through.” Jenna held out her left hand. “Give me Treoraí’s Heart. I’ll give it to her myself before we go.”
    Mundy looked at Jenna’s outstretched hand but didn’t respond. “Meriel’s not you, Jenna,” Mundy said. “She’s not her da either—and I mean her real da, not Kyle MacEagan. She’s just . . . herself.” His hand was still closed around the stone. He looked again at Jenna’s hand, then at her bitter frown. “If you want me to be Meriel’s teacher, then you also have to trust my judgment in this, Jenna. Otherwise, you can teach her yourself. Can you really handle that responsibility, along with all the others you’ve taken on?”
    A grimace twisted her lips. In that moment, she looked older, and Mundy realized how much the years had touched her. “It would be nice to have a daughter or a friend who simply obeyed me when I asked them to do something.”
    “A Banrion can demand unquestioning obedience from her subjects, but a friend will give the Banrion honesty instead, even when I tell her something she doesn’t want to hear. Which do you want me to be, Jenna: friend or subject?”
    Grimace slid into scowl. The fingers of Jenna’s right hand twitched, as if she wanted to form it into a fist but couldn’t. “You sound more like old Máister Cléurach every time we meet, Mundy Kirwan. You have the same arrogance and the same stubborn belief that you’re the only one who’s ever right.”
    He scowled back at her. “It’s the air at Inishfeirm,” Mundy answered. “It turns us all into grumpy old curmudgeons before our time. Evidently you stayed there long enough to be infected yourself.” He held the scowl for a moment longer until he saw her lips relax and her head shake, and he laughed into her reluctant smile. He put the clochmion back in his pocket.
    “I’ll take care of your daughter as if she were my own, Jenna,” he said. “I promise you that. With the help of the Order, Meriel will find the strength that’s inside herself and bring it out.”

3
    Inside the Keep
    T HE ONE, the only, good thing about the trip to Inishfeirm was the three days at sea it would take to get there.
    Meriel had loved the sea instinctively from the time she first remembered seeing it: the smell of the brine; the delicate changing colors of water under the sky, from slate gray to foaming green to cobalt blue; the aching vastness and sheer weight of the ocean, extending unbroken out to the limits of her sight and hiding unguessed treasures underneath; the raw, seething power of the storms that often swept over Inish Thuaidh from across the Westering Sea. Whether at Dún Kiil or at her da’s estates at Dun Madadh, Meriel spent as much time as she could at the shore or in one of the currachs, watching the cavorting seals and the wheeling gulls.
    A year ago, she’d spotted a family of blue seals just off Little Head at Dun Kiil: the Saimhóir who had their own language and who her mam claimed could also harness the energy of the