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

mage-lights. She’d watched them lolling on rocks a few hundred strides out in the water, the sunlight striking sparkling emerald highlights from their black fur. Their craning heads noticed her watching them from the shore and they seemed to call to her, honking and moaning in their odd tongue before finally slipping back into the water and moving down the coastline. Meriel had watched for them for several weeks afterward, but never saw them again.
    As much as was possible on the Uaigneas, the royal ship with its double masts, Meriel stayed away from Máister Kirwan and her mam, who had also accompanied them on the trip. Instead, she dutifully wrote a long letter every morning to Lucan, placing it in an envelope and sealing it. That’s what she and Lucan had vowed they would do during that last unhappy (and too well-chaperoned) meeting before the ship left: they would write to each other each day. She would send the first packet of envelopes back to him via the captain of the Uaigneas once they reached Inishfeirm, and she hoped the first of Lucan’s letters was already on its way to her.
    She also prowled the decks with Nainsi, who seemed singularly unhappy to be at sea—or perhaps her gloomy face was more due to the fact that this was the last time she’d accompany Meriel. Unlike the children of most other Riocha, Meriel had never been sent away to foster-age. No, Jenna had wanted her near—“For your safety,” she said curtly when Meriel had asked why—but while they lived in the same keep, Jenna rarely spent much time with her daughter, leaving her in the care of a succession of nurses and teachers and caregivers. Nainsi had been Meriel’s attendant/guardian since she was ten summers old: a dour, plain girl five years older than Meriel, the daughter of a minor tiarna from the townland of Rubha na Scarbh. Meriel knew that Nainsi enjoyed the reflected glory of being in the Banrion’s household, and after the severe tongue-lashing she’d received from the Banrion in the aftermath of yesterday, Nainsi was afraid that she’d be dismissed entirely.
    “Your mam says that she’ll try to find something for me within the keep, but after what’s happened she could order me away. Then what happens to me? My da and mam would be furious, and they’ll marry me to some flatulent, pig-farming céili giallnai from Tuath Éoganacht. Promise me you’ll talk to her, Meriel. After all our time together . . .”
    Meriel tried to ignore Nainsi’s whining, finding some small pleasure in talking with the sailors, listening to their rowing songs and their rough jests, though Nainsi pretended to be horrified and tried to lead her away. Meriel also spent a lot of time simply standing at the ship’s prow, watching the waves break white against the carved image of a sea serpent. She pretended that the voyage would never end, that she would see Lucan coming after her in a ship of his own, and she would leap over the side of Uaigneas to him and they would sail off on an adventure to some far, unknown shore, perhaps as far as Thall Mór-roinn. Or if not Lucan, then a storm that would hurl Uaigneas before its fury and drive them into the rocks somewhere else, anywhere else but Inishfeirm. But Lucan’s ship never came, nor the storm, and by evening they were rounding the long arm of An Ceann Caol and beginning to slip westward.
    Meriel took her supper in the cabin she and Nainsi shared. When she came back on deck, she saw her mam standing at the rail of the ship. She started to turn back, but her mam caught sight of her. “Meriel, come here . . .” she said. With a sigh, Meriel went over to her. Jenna pointed down at the water. “Look,” she said. “The seals have come to say hello.”
    Around the ship, several large seals were skimming through the wake of the ship, occasionally jumping from the water. “Those are blues,” Jenna said. “Saimhóir.”
    “I know,” Meriel told her. “I’ve seen them before, out near Little