harp, and the pouch of tuning pins. Conor flipped open the sword’s case as Eoghan laid out the eight pins he had salvaged from the ruins of Cill Rhí. Aine placed her charm on the table between them, its carved symbols facing up.
“They’re runes,” Eoghan said in surprise.
“Aye.” Not all of the runes on the pins were present on the sword or vice versa, but several—the wheel, something that looked like an arrow, and a strange crosshatch—were. Conor reached for the nearest pin and held it in his hand, expecting to feel some indication of magic, but he felt nothing.
“I don’t understand,” Conor murmured. “I was sure this was the source of the sword’s power.”
“Maybe it is,” Aine said. “The runes are a language, right? You can’t just put random words together and expect them to mean something.”
“So they only work together,” Eoghan said. “Which means you need to put them in the harp. We already know these mean something or they wouldn’t have been on Meallachán’s instrument.”
“But we have less than a third of the pins. How do we know we have the ones we need?”
They frowned as they looked over the items, all objects of power, all mysterious.
“The three have this one in common.” Aine pointed to the rune that looked like a wheel charm.
Eoghan lifted it and considered. “The name of Comdiu, the three parts of our God.”
Conor glanced at Eoghan, startled, and nodded. It made sense. He unscrewed the first tuning pin and replaced it with the rune pin, then tuned the string until it sounded true.
He plucked it one last time, and a deep vibration hummed inside him. His eyes widened. “What’s next?”
Aine scanned the runes. “This one is common among all three as well.”
Eoghan picked it up. “Protection. Actually, it’s the rune for sword, but it means the same thing.”
Conor stared at Eoghan. His friend had always insisted that he had no knowledge of languages or magic, yet now he spoke with absolute certainty. Conor didn’t argue, though. He just put the pin on the end of the harp opposite the wheel.
Language or not, this was more like constructing a building than a sentence: bracket a span of notes with Comdiu’s protection, fill it in with magic. It made sense in a symbolic sort of way.
“What about the rest?”
Eoghan touched each in turn. “I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Conor spread each of the other six pins at even intervals along the harp. Once he had tuned each of the notes, he ran his fingers along the strings. Magic hummed on his skin.
He glanced at Eoghan and Aine. “Shall we give it another try?”
“Shouldn’t we get the others first?” Aine asked.
Eoghan shook his head slightly. Conor agreed with him. As confident as he felt, this still might not work. It was like trying to speak a language of which you had only the most rudimentary knowledge. The message had the potential to get garbled in the delivery. And with only eight of the twenty-eight pins . . .
“All right, let’s give it a try, then.” He forced a confidence he didn’t feel into his tone.
The first note sent a shiver through his body as he began to play. This time he didn’t control the music. It almost wasn’t even a song. It was a breath, a prayer, a plea to Comdiu—an acknowledgement that while his skills were too meager to accomplish something this vast, he served a God who was greater and more powerful than that which they battled against.
Perhaps that was the reason for the magic embedded in the runes: a reminder that there was something bigger and more mysterious at work than what they could accomplish by their own abilities.
And then the music changed again to that golden light, spilling out like liquid metal and seeping into the city’s foundation like rain. It was not a shield as he had first conceived but rather the touch of hallowed ground. A benediction. A blessing. It sped along the earth like a flood, burning away invisible shreds of mist it met along the way. And somewhere in his heart, Conor understood.
Ard Dhaimhin was not meant to be protected and shielded from the kingdom; it was to be its heart, its shield, its sword. What they built here would endure not because of any attempt to make it safe but because they were courageous enough to stand against the evil that threatened it.
When the last note died, Conor didn’t need Aine to