Heir of Stone by S. L. Farrell

Author:S. L. Farrell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult
ISBN: 9781101098486
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2005-01-02T13:00:00+00:00

Now, three days later, Ennis was well into the empty land between the Daoine and the Arruk. Once already, he’d caught the scent of Arruk on the breeze, but the pattern had told him it wasn’t time yet, and so he’d hidden until the troop of Arruk soldiers had passed. He watched them curiously from his hiding place off the side of the road: staring at their rude clothing—a simple loincloth around the hips, at the reptilian skin and snouted faces, at the slime-lathered nostrils and the great clawed hands, their flesh painted with strange marks and sigils. He found himself wondering whether the pattern was leading him to the right place.

These were creatures from his nightmares. These were the monsters from a Songmaster’s tale. These were beasts who were the grandchildren of the Seed-Daughter, the spawn of the Miondia, the lesser gods who were the result of the Seed-Daughter’s rape by Darkness. Ennis had heard the sinister tales of the Days of Creation, chanted by the Draíodóiri during the gloomy Festival of Gheimhri. Some of the older children sometimes laughed at the stories, whispering that this was all they were: stories.

Now Ennis believed them. He shivered, not from the cold, and wished he could go back the way he’d come: to Cairnmor, to Talamh An Ghlas and Dún Laoghaire. But he couldn’t. The blue ghosts had sealed that way from him—they showed him that if he tried to go that way, he would certainly die. He could only go forward, following the steps of the dance that he’d chosen.

When the Arruk passed, Ennis came out from the brush and bramble. For a moment he stood in the road, as uncertain and scared and lonely as any child of his age would have been. “Mam . . . Da . . . Gram . . . Kayne . . . Sevei . . . Ionhar . . . Tara . . .” He whispered their names as if they were incantations that could bring their ghosts to stand before him, but nothing happened. He touched Treoraí’s Heart on its chain, remembering how it would gleam on his mam’s clóca. “You will wield the full power of the Heart,” Isibéal’s voice whispered to him. “You will be stronger than your mam ever was, and no one will be able to kill you the way they killed her and your da and your siblings. The Heart might rival even Lámh Shábhála.”

That didn’t comfort him. “Let me talk to Mam,” he said. “Let me hear her.”

Isibéal only laughed in response.

Ennis wiped his nose. He sniffed.

He started walking east once more.

It was late afternoon when he smelled them again, and this time the scenery around him was overlaid with the traces of the blue ghosts. He knew that this was the moment. He hopped quickly over the stone fence bordering the road, just to where it curved southward around a bare-topped hill where sheep had once grazed, and whose lower slopes were now blanketed with high, seed-topped grass.

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