The Shadow Isle

THE

SHADOW ISLE

BOOK SIX OF

THE DRAGON MAGE

KATHARINE KERR

COPYRIGHT

Published by Harper Voyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London w6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2008

Copyright © Katharine Kerr 2008

Katharine Kerr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007268924

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007283378

Version: 2014-08-11

DEDICATION

For Elizabeth Pomada

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue: In a Far Country

Part I: The Westlands Spring, 1160

Part II: The Northlands Spring, 1160

Part III: The Northlands Summer, 1160

Keep Reading

Glossary

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Despite what you may have heard or read elsewhere, The Shadow Isle is not the last book in the Deverry sequence. It is, however, the beginning of the end, Part I of the last Deverry book, as it were. The true end will be published soon as The Silver Mage, also from HarperCollins.

PROLOGUE

In a Far Country

You say that the three Mothers of All Roads run tangled beyond your power to map them. Why then would you ask to travel the seven Rivers of Time? Their braiding lies beyond even the understanding of the Great Ones, so be ye warned and stay safely upon their banks.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

Laz woke to darkness and noise. Gongs clanged, men shouted. Not one word made sense to him, and no more did the sound of water lapping and splashing. He could smell nothing but water. Pain – his hands burned, but the rest of him felt cold, soaked through, he realized suddenly, sopping wet. How his hands could burn when he was sopping wet lay beyond him. The gongs came closer, louder. Waves lifted him and splashed him back down. Floating, he thought. I’m floating on water.

The shouting came from right over his head. Hands suddenly grabbed him, hauled, lifted him into the air while the shouting and the gongs clamoured all around. Hands laid him down again on something hard that rocked from side to side. The shouting stopped, but the gongs clanged on and on. Through the sound of gongs he heard a dark voice speaking. Not one word of it!

The voice tried yet another incomprehensible language, then a third. ‘Here, lad, speak you this tongue?’

Lijik Ganda, he thought. Just my luck. ‘I do,’ Laz said aloud. ‘A bit, anyway.’

‘Splendid! Who are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Laz put panic into his voice. ‘I don’t remember. Where are we? Why is it so dark?’

‘It’s not dark, lad. There’s a lantern shining right into your face.’

‘I’m blind? I don’t remember being blind.’

Voices murmured in one of the languages he couldn’t understand. Someone patted his shoulder as if trying to comfort him. The rocking continued, the splashing and the gongs.

‘Here!’ Laz said. ‘Are we on a boat?’

‘We are, and heading for the island. Just rest, lad. The ladies of the isle know a fair bit about healing. It may be that they can do somewhat about your eyes, I don’t know. I’d wager high that they can heal your hands at the very least.’

‘They do pain me.’

‘No doubt! Black as pitch, they are. You just rest. We’re coming up to the pier.’

‘My thanks. Did you save my life?’

‘Most likely.’ The voice broke into a wry laugh. ‘The beasts of the lake nearly got a meal out of you.’

Beasts. Lake. Blind. None of it made sense. He fainted.

Laz woke next to light, only a faint fuzzy reddish glow, but light nonetheless. Most of him felt dry and warm, but his burning hands lay in water, and water dripped over his face. The scent of mixed herbs overwhelmed him; he could smell nothing beyond plant matter and spices. He could hear, however, women talking. Two women, he realized, though he understood not one word of what they were saying. The pain in his left hand suddenly eased. A woman laughed and spoke a few triumphant words, then lifted the hand out of the water and laid it down on something dry and soft.

‘I think me he wakes,’ the other woman said in Deverrian.

‘I do,’ Laz said.

‘Good,’ Woman the First said, ‘but there be a need on you to stay quiet till we get the burnt skin free from your right hand.’

‘Is it that you see light?’ Woman the Second said.

‘Some, truly.’

‘Try opening your eyes.’

With some effort – his lids seemed stuck together with pitch – he did. What he saw danced and swam. Slowly the motion stopped. The view looked strangely blurred and smeared, but he could distinguish shapes at a distance and objects nearby. In a pool of lantern light two women leaned over him, one with grey-streaked yellow hair and a tired face, and one young with hair as dark as a raven’s wing and cornflower-blue eyes.

‘My name be Marnmara.’ The young woman pointed at her elder. ‘This be Angmar, my mam. The boatmen tell me you remember not your own name.’

Laz considered what to say. He’d not wanted to tell the boatmen his name until he knew more about them, but these women were doing their best to heal him. He owed them the courtesy of a better lie. ‘I didn’t, not right then, but it’s Tirn. I think I have a second name, too, but I can’t seem to remember it.’

‘There be no surprise on me for that,’ Marnmara said. ‘Whatever you did endure, it were a great bad thing.’

He started to lift his left hand to look at it, but Angmar grabbed his elbow and pinned it to the bed. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It be not a pleasant sight, with you so burned and all.’

‘Burned.’ He formed the words carefully. ‘How badly?’

Angmar looked at her daughter and quirked an eyebrow.

‘I doubt me if you’ll have the use of all your fingers,’ Marnmara said. ‘But mayhap we can free the thumb and one other. The right hand’s a bit better, I think me. Mayhap we can free two and the thumb.’

‘Free them? From what?’

‘Scars. They might grow together.’

Panic struck him. Will I be able to fly again? The one question he didn’t dare ask was the only question in the world that mattered.

‘Why is the pain gone?’ he asked instead.

‘The herbs,’ Marnmara said. ‘But the healing, it’ll not be easy.’

‘It’s very kind of you to help me.’

‘I will heal any hurt that I ken how to heal,’ Marnmara said. ‘Such was my vow.’

‘We have your black gem.’ Angmar held up something shiny. ‘Fret not about it.’

‘My thanks.’ Dimly he remembered that he once had owned a pair. ‘Not the white one? I carried a gem in each hand.’

‘The boatmen did find this one clutched in your left hand. Your right hand trailed open in the water. I think me the other be at the bottom of the lake by now.’

‘So be it, then.’

He realized that he could now see Angmar more clearly. Whether because of the herbs or time passing, his eyes were clearing. What had blinded him? The flash of light. He remembered the pure white flash and the sensation of falling a long, long way down. Why didn’t I listen to Sisi? For that he had no answer.

Angmar glanced at her hands, flecked with black. Marnmara picked up a rag from the bed on which he lay and offered it to her mother, who began to wipe her fingers clean.

‘Those cinders are bits of me,’ Laz said.

‘I fear me they are.’ Angmar cocked her head to one side and studied his face. ‘Need you to vomit? I’ve a basin right here.’

Instead he fainted again.

‘I hear that the island witches have a new demon,’ Diarmuid the Brewer said. ‘Maybe he’s that snake-eyed lass’s sweetheart, eh?’

‘They’re not witches,’ Dougie said. ‘Avain’s not a demon, just a mooncalf. And how many times now have I told you all that?’

‘Talk all you want, lad. You’re blind to the truth because of the young one. A pretty thing, Berwynna, truly.’

‘But treacherous nonetheless,’ Father Colm broke in. ‘Never forget that about witches. Fair of face, foul of soul.’

Dougie felt an all too familiar urge to throw the contents of his tankard into the holy man’s face. As for Diarmuid, he wasn’t in the least holy, merely too old to challenge to a fight. Dougie calmed himself with a long swallow of ale. Father Colm set his tankard down on the ground, then pulled the skirts of his brown cassock up to his knees, exposing hairy legs and sandalled feet.

‘Hot today,’ the priest remarked.

‘It is that, truly,’ Diarmuid said.

In the spring sun, the three of them were sitting outside the tumbledown shack that did the village as a tavern. Since most of the local people were crofters who lived out on the land, four slate-roofed stone cottages and a covered well made up the entire village. It was more green than grey, though, with kitchen gardens and a grassy commons for the long-horned shaggy milk cows. From where he sat, Dougie could see the only impressive building for miles around, Lord Douglas’s dun, looming off to the west on a low hill.

‘If this new fellow’s not a demon,’ Diarmuid started in again, ‘then who is he, eh?’

‘He doesn’t remember much beyond his name,’ Dougie said. ‘It’s as simple as that. Tirn, he calls himself. Some traveller who ended up in the lake, that’s all.’

‘Burnt a fair bit, and him with unholy sigils all over his face? Hah!’ Father Colm hauled himself up from the rickety bench. ‘Now, frankly, I don’t think he’s a demon. I think he’s a warlock who was trying to raise a demon and paid for his sinful folly. Speaking of paying –’ He laid a hand on the leather wallet hanging from his rope belt.

‘Nah, nah, nah, Father,’ Diarmuid said. ‘Just say a prayer for me.’

‘I will do that.’ Colm fixed him with a gooseberry eye. ‘For a fair many reasons.’

With a wave the priest waddled off down the dirt road in the direction of Lord Douglas’s dun and chapel. Diarmuid leaned back against the wall of the shed and watched the chickens pecking around his feet. Dougie had stopped by the old man’s on his way to Haen Marn to hear what the local gossips were saying – plenty, apparently. Diarmuid waited until the priest had got out of earshot before he spoke.

‘Well, now, lad, you’ve seen this fellow, haven’t you? Do you think he’s a demon?’

‘I do not, as indeed our priest said, too. He must be a foreigner, is all, and most likely from Angmar’s home country.’

‘Imph.’ Diarmuid sucked the stumps that had once been his front teeth in thought. ‘Well, one of these days Father Colm’s going to work his lordship around to burning these witches, and that will be that. I’m surprised he’s not done it already.’ Diarmuid spoke casually, but he was looking sideways at Dougie out of one rheumy eye.

‘It’s Mic’s hard coin,’ Dougie said. ‘Who else around here can pay his taxes in anything but kind? A silver penny a year the jeweller gives over, and that buys my Gran a fine warhorse for one of his men.’

‘Well now, you’ve got a point there. The village folk keep wondering, though, if his lordship holds his hand because of your mother.’

‘Are you implying that my mother’s a witch?’ Dougie rose from the bench and laid his free hand on his sword hilt.

‘What?’ Diarmuid nearly dropped his tankard. ‘Naught of the sort, lad! Now, hold your water, like! All I meant was that she’s the lordship’s daughter, and you’re her son, and there’s Berwynna, and uh well er …’ He ran out of words and breath both.

Dougie put his half-full tankard down on the bench.

‘I’ll just be getting on,’ Dougie said. ‘You can finish that if you’d like.’

Dougie strode out of the yard and slammed the rickety gate behind him for good measure. Although he owned a horse, he’d left him behind at the steading. Still glowering, he set out on foot for Haen Marn.

Dougie had good reason to be touchy on the subject of witchcraft. All his young life he’d overheard rumours about his mother and father. In the impoverished loch country of northern Alban, the steading of Domnal Breich and his wife, Jehan, had flourished into a marvel. Every spring their milk cows gave birth to healthy calves, and their ewes had twins more often than not. In the summer their oats and barley stood high; their apple trees bowed under the weight of fruit. When Domnal went fishing he’d bring home a full net every single time.

Some neighbours grumbled that Domnal must have made a pact with the Devil. As those things will, the grumbling had spread, but not as far as you might think, because Jehan was the local lord’s daughter. Lord Douglas, whose name Dougie bore, disliked nasty talk about his kin. No one cared to have their gossip silenced by a hangman’s noose.

The gossip had transferred itself to the mysterious women on the island to the north of Lord Douglas’s lands. Lady Angmar – everyone assumed she was of high birth because she had dwarves in her household – and her twin daughters had spawned ten times the gossip that Domnal and Jehan ever had. Partisan though he was, Dougie could understand why the folk spoke of demons and witchery. The women and their island had turned up some seventeen winters ago, in the year before he’d been born. The older people around remembered its location as a wide spot in a burn, not a loch at all, but when the island arrived, one winter night, it brought its own water with it.

Witchcraft – a house, island, and loch appearing like that out of nowhere! ‘All the way from Cymru they came in the blink of an eye,’ the old people said, ‘and they must have come from Cymru, judging by the way they speak. Foreigners, that’s what they are! What else could they be but witches, them and their flying house?’

The loch that harboured the island lay in a dip of land too shallow to be called a valley, but the dark blue water must have run deep, because the same beasts that dwelled in Loch Ness lived beneath its choppy waves. The small island rose out of the water like the crest of a rocky hill. At its highest point stood a square-built tall tower, surrounded by apple trees. At its lowest point, a sandy cove, stood a wooden pier and a boathouse. In between the two stood the manse, such a solid structure that it was hard to imagine it taking to the air like an enchanted swan from some old tale.

Solid, and yet, and yet – the buildings seemed to move around on the island, just now and then, when no one was looking. Whenever he visited, Dougie made sure to stand on the same spot to view it. Sometimes the manse appeared to be closer to the tower than on others, or the tower presented a corner rather than a flat side, or the entire island seemed a little nearer the shore or farther away. He’d once asked Lady Angmar about the shifting view. She’d scowled and told him he’d been drinking too much dark ale. He’d never got up the courage to ask again.

At the edge of the loch a big granite boulder sat among tall grass. An iron loop protruded from its side, and from the loop dangled a silver horn on a silver chain. Oddly enough, neither silver piece ever tarnished, no matter how wet the weather. This clear evidence of witchcraft – well, clear in the minds of the local folk – had kept them from being stolen. Dougie picked up the horn and blew three long notes, then let it swing free again. While he waited, he took off his boots and hitched up his plaid, tucking the ends into his heavy belt.

Not long after he saw the longboat set out from the pier under oars. He heard the bronze gong clanging, just in case the beasts in the lake were on the prowl for a meal. Fortunately, the water near shore ran too shallow for the beasts. When the boat pulled up, with the oarsmen backing water to hold her steady, Dougie waded out and with the help of the boatmaster, Lon, hauled himself aboard.

‘And a good morrow to you,’ Dougie said.

‘Same to you.’ Lon knew only a few words of the Alban language. ‘Take gong?’

‘I will, and gladly.’ Dougie took the mallet from him.

While they rowed across, Dougie smacked the gong to keep it clanging and whistled for good measure. Once, when he looked over to the far side of the loch, he saw a tiny snake-like head on the end of a long neck lift itself out of the water, but at his shout the beast dived, disappearing without a ripple. As they approached the island, Berwynna walked out on the pier to meet the boat. His heart began pounding as loudly as the gong, or so it seemed to him.

A slender lass, she stood barely up to his chest. She wore her glossy raven-dark hair clasped back. Her cornflower-blue eyes dominated her delicate face. To set off her colouring she wore a finely woven plaid in a blue and grey tartan – cloth that Mic the Dwarf had brought home from Din Edin, earned by his trade in gems and jewellery. When she saw Dougie she smiled and hurried forward to help him onto the pier.

‘I’d hoped to see you today,’ Berwynna said.

‘Well, I truly came to see you,’ Dougie said, ‘but I told my mother that I need to see your Mic. I was wondering if he’ll be travelling south soon.’

‘He will.’ Berwynna’s smile disappeared. ‘I hate when you go a trading with Uncle Mic.’

‘He’s got to have some kind of guard on the road.’ Dougie grinned at her. ‘Do you miss me when I’m gone?’

‘That, too. Mostly I wish I could go with you. I want to see Din Edin, and I don’t care how bad it smells.’

‘A journey like ours is no place for a lass.’

‘If you say that again, I’ll kick you. You sound like Mam.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but –’

‘Oh don’t let’s talk about it!’

Berwynna turned on her heel and strode down the pier to the island, leaving Dougie to hurry after, babbling apologies. By the time they reached the door of the manse, she’d forgiven him. Hand in hand they walked into the great hall of Haen Marn.

On either side of the big square room stood stone hearths, one of them cold on this warm spring day. At the other an ancient maidservant stirred a big iron kettle over a slow fire. The smell and steam of a cauldron of porridge spread through the hall. The boatmen came trooping in and sat down at one of the plank tables scattered here and there on the floor. At the head table sat Angmar, her greying pale hair swept back and covered by the black headscarf of a widow. When Dougie and Berwynna joined her, she greeted them with a pleasant smile.

‘Come to talk to Mic, Dougie?’ Angmar spoke the Alban tongue not well but clearly.

‘I have, my lady,’ Dougie said. ‘Will he be needing my sword soon?’

‘Most likely. You can ask him after he’s joining us.’

One of the boatmen brought Dougie a tankard of ale, which he took with thanks. He had a long sip and looked around the great hall. In one corner a staircase led to the upper floors. In the opposite corner old Otho, a white-haired, stoop-shouldered and generally frail dwarf, sat on his cushioned chair, glaring from under white bushy brows at nothing in particular. Berwynna’s sister, Marnmara, stood near the old man while she studied the wall behind him.

The two young woman had been born in the same hour, and they shared the same colouring. Marnmara however was even smaller than her sister, a mere wisp of a woman, or so Dougie thought of her. At times he could have sworn that she floated above the floor by an inch or two, as if she weren’t really in the room at all but a reflection, perhaps, in some invisible mirror. At others she walked upon the ground like any lass, and he would chide himself for indulging in daft fancies about her.

Haen Marn’s great hall tended to breed fancies. The dark oak panels lining the walls were as heavily decorated as the Holy Book in Lord Douglas’s chapel. Great swags of carved interlacements, all tangled with animals, flowers, and vines, swooped down from each corner and almost touched the floor before sweeping up again. In among them were little designs that might have been letters or simply odd little fragments of some broken pattern. Berwynna had told him of her sister’s belief that the decorations had some sort of meaning, just as if they’d been a book indeed. Since Dougie couldn’t read a word in any language, it was all a great mystery to him.

‘Think she’ll ever puzzle it out?’ Dougie said to Berwynna.

‘She tells me she’s very close. Tirn’s been a great help to her. He knows what some of the sigils are.’

‘Sigils?’

‘It means marks like those little ones.’ Berwynna shrugged. ‘That’s all I know.’

‘The townsfolk are saying that Tirn’s a demon.’

‘Are you surprised? They think we’re all witches and demons, don’t they?’

‘Well, true enough, the ingrates! And after all the healing your sister’s done for them, too!’

Tirn came in not long after. Like Dougie himself, he was an unusually tall man, and no doubt he’d once been a strong one, too, judging from his broad shoulders and long, heavily muscled arms, but at the moment he was still recovering from whatever accident had burned him so badly. He walked slowly, a little stooped, and held his damaged hands away from his body. Thin cloth, smelling heavily of Marnmara’s herbal medicaments, wrapped his hands and arms up to the elbows. Peeling-pink scars cut into the tattoos on his narrow face and marbled his short brown hair. He nodded Dougie’s way with a weary smile, then sat down across from him at the table.

Angmar asked him a question in the language that the locals took for Cymraeg, and Tirn answered her in the same. Berwynna leaned forward and joined the conversation. Here and there Dougie could pick out a word or phrase – Berwynna had been teaching him a bit of her native tongue – but they spoke too quickly for him to follow. Tirn considered whatever it was she’d said, then smiled and nodded.

‘Mam’s asking him if Marnmara can take another look at this gem he brought with him,’ Berwynna told Dougie. ‘Uncle Mic says it’s a bit of cut firestone. I’ve not seen anything like it before.’

Angmar got up and went round to where Tirn sat. With his burnt hands still so bad, he could touch nothing. She pulled a leather pouch on a chain free of Tirn’s shirt. From the pouch she took out a black glassy gem, shaped into a pyramid about six inches tall. The tip had been lopped off at an angle.