The Shadow Isle

‘Wise One, will you come back to us in the fall?’ Lara said.

‘If it’s not an imposition –’

‘What?’ Lara gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Not in the least! It’s an honour we’ve revelled in having.’

‘In that case, I’ll come back, yes. And you have my thanks for your hospitality.’

Valandario followed her belongings out of town in an odd sort of procession. As they walked through the streets, every person they passed ran up to bid her farewell and to urge her to return. ‘I’ll come back,’ she told them all, ‘and this time, I’ll stay.’ If naught else, she told herself, I won’t have to watch Loddlaen grow up if I’m here.

Next to the north-running road, the alar was striking tents and loading them onto travois and pack horses. Children ran back and forth; dogs barked; adults yelled at each other and bickered. Out in the wild grass the men were rounding up the horses, and the sheepdogs were forming up the bleating flocks. It was all so familiar that Val had a moment of thinking she might miss it; then she reminded herself of the smoky dung fires, the black flies, and down near the coast, the mosquitoes.

As she made her way through the crowd, Valandario came across Neb, kneeling beside a travois and tying down some sacks of gear. He worked slowly, methodically, with an odd set to his shoulders, as if perhaps his neck or arms pained him. His yellow gnome stood nearby, hands on its hips, and watched with a frown. Val stopped beside him.

‘Neb,’ she said in Deverrian, ‘are you all right?’

He looked up at her, but for a moment he didn’t recognize her – she could see the lack in his ice-blue eyes, cold, narrowing, suddenly affronted. The yellow gnome reached over and pinched him. Neb laughed and shook his head in self-mockery.

‘My apologies, Wise One,’ Neb said, ‘I was thinking somewhat through.’

‘Well and good, then, but you know, you need to close down your dweomer practices when it’s time to do mundane things.’

‘I do know that!’ he snapped at her, then once again covered it with a smile. ‘But you speak true, of course. Actually, I was only thinking about herblore, what plants will help wounds heal cleanly and the like.’

‘Oh, well, then, that shouldn’t harm you. But do try to strike a balance, Neb, between this world and the ones beyond.’

‘I’ll try harder to do just that.’ But his tone of voice implied that he had no intention of following her advice.

As Valandario walked on, she was thinking that she was glad he was Dallandra’s apprentice, not hers.

Branna had already noticed the problem that Valandario had seen in Neb’s eyes. Even as the alar travelled north, the two apprentices kept up the practices their teachers had set them. Every morning and evening, they found time for their work while the camp packed up from the night’s stop or set back up again in the sunset light. When it rained, the alar stayed in camp, giving them a day or two to catch up on anything they might have missed.

After the simplest dweomer exercise, even so little as tracing a pentagram in the air with his hand, Neb’s ice-blue glance turned cold and penetrating. He would seem to be looking at the view or whatever lay in front of him from a great distance away, as if he were unsure of its reasons for existing. Yet when he turned away and looked at Branna, he would smile, and the expression in his eyes became soft and warm again. This pronounced change made her feel that she was watching a shape-changer, not an apprentice.

On a morning when the rain kept the alar in camp, Neb spent some hours working through the steps of a simple ritual, tracing out a circle around him, then visualizing blue fire springing up at his command. Branna, who’d been doing some memory work, looked up from her book to watch him as he finished the exercise. This time the look in his eyes made her think of an honour-bound warrior who sees his worst enemy. Then he glanced her way and grinned.

‘This is harder than I thought,’ Neb said.

He’s back. The words formed themselves in Branna’s mind so clearly that she laid a hand over her mouth as if to keep them in. She covered the gesture with a cough.

‘It is, truly,’ Branna said. ‘My mind keeps wandering when I try to see the flames.’

‘Mine too. I keep thinking about that wretched plague back in Trev Hael.’ Neb paused, frowning at the floor cloth. ‘I keep wondering how it spread so fast, and why it spread at all.’

‘Well, my poor beloved, it was a truly ghastly horrid experience. I’m not surprised you can’t forget it.’

‘It’s not a question of forgetting, but of understanding it.’ He looked up, his eyes so grim and cold that she flinched. ‘Is somewhat wrong?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Branna said. ‘It’s like you become someone else at times. When you work dweomer, you turn into Nevyn, don’t you?’

‘Well, so what if I do? I mean, I am Nevyn, really, when you think about it. I was him, and if we’re talking about the long view of things, I am him still.’

‘You’re not, though. You’ve got a new life now.’

His look turned murderous, but only briefly. ‘Well, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Of course that’s true. On some level, anyway.’

‘On all levels. You should tell Dalla about this.’

‘You’re right. I will, then.’

Yet she didn’t believe him, not for a moment. Although she considered telling Dallandra herself, she knew that such would be an interference between him and his master in the craft, to say naught of going behind his back and risking a hellish argument if he found out.

They did argue, these days, in a way they never had during the first idyllic months of their marriage. Branna wanted to think that they were both uncomfortable from the damp and the cold, to say naught of the utter strangeness of their new home, but at heart she was too honest to dismiss the problem so easily. ‘He wants me to be Jill,’ she told Grallezar. ‘And I won’t. At times he even calls me Jill, and I refuse to answer until he uses my real name. Then he gets angry with me.’

Her teacher considered, sucking a thoughtful fang. Since Grallezar shaved her head, she was wearing a knitted wool cap, striped in grey and blackish-brown, that came down low over her ears and forehead. She’d also bundled herself in a heavy wool cloak and wore fur-lined boots against the cold. Back in her home country, she’d spent winters in a heated house, not a drafty tent.

‘Well, he be not my student,’ Grallezar said at last. ‘So this be but a guess. I think me that Nevyn’s life, it were so long that Neb be unable to remember past it. From our work I know that you do see bits and pieces of many lives and deaths.’

‘That’s true. Jill’s life is only one of them. I’m not Jill any more than Jill was Morwen or Branoic.’

‘True spoken. But Neb, the only memory that lives for him is Nevyn, and by all that I have heard, he were a mighty dweomermaster indeed. Neb does covet all that power. To earn it all again, to do the work, it be burdensome, but needful.’

‘I see. There’s another thing, too. He keeps thinking about the plague in Trev Hael that killed his father and sister. He talks about it a lot. It’s so morbid! It can’t be good for him.’

‘Well, mayhap, mayhap not. There may be a riddle there for him to answer.’ Grallezar held up a warning forefinger. ‘Not one word of this to Neb, mind, and no more may you tell Dallandra of your fears. For a student to interfere with another master’s student be a baleful thing.’

‘I promise I won’t.’

‘Good. It would go ill for you were you to throw my words in Neb’s face.’ Grallezar suddenly smiled. ‘But of course, I be a master myself, and if I should speak to Dallandra, well, who’s to say me nay?’

Branna felt so relieved that she nearly wept. I’ve been frightened, she thought, not just worried.

Over the next few weeks, Branna found herself hard-pressed to keep her promise to Grallezar, but every time she was tempted to break it, her own mind distracted her by raising the enormous question that lay just beyond her worries about Neb. If he wasn’t Nevyn, then who was Neb? Worse yet, if she wasn’t Jill, was she truly Branna? Who was any person, then, whether Westfolk or Gel da’Thae or human being, if their body and their personality were only masks they wore for a little while, masks that they’d toss aside at their death only to don new ones at birth?

Contemplating such matters made her turn cold with terror, as if she stood on the very edge of a high cliff and felt the soil under her feet begin to crumble away. She would jump back from that edge and take refuge in any distraction she could find. In a travelling alar, distractions lay thick on the ground, most of them trivial, though now and again Branna found something that hinted at her future role of Wise One.

One evening, just at sunset, she was walking back to her tent when she heard someone weeping, a soft little sound, half-suppressed, unlike the usual loud sobs of one of the Westfolk. She followed the sound and discovered Sidro, standing alone out in the wild grass. Overhead the sky hung low with clouds, dark and gathering.

‘What’s wrong?’ Branna said from behind her. ‘Can I help?’

Sidro swirled around, her eyes wide and tear-wet, her hand at her throat.

‘A thousand apologies!’ Branna said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Sidro tried to smile, sniffed back tears, and finally wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Oh, tis naught,’ she said at last. ‘Just a silly moment.’

‘Oh now here, if somewhat’s made you cry, it can’t be naught.’ Branna laid a gentle hand on Sidro’s shoulder. ‘Tell me. Is it about Laz?’

‘Him, too, but missing my old home in Taenalapan is the most of it. Which be a strange thing, since I was but a slave lass there. It were always warm and dry in the house, and there were warm bread and laughter. I think me that be what I miss the most.’

‘I can certainly understand that! But truly, I don’t see how the comfort would make being a slave tolerable. Didn’t you long to get away and be free?’

‘And how was I to know what being free did mean?’ Sidro smiled with a rueful twist of her mouth. ‘Laz, he did say somewhat about that to me once, that all I did know was slavery, whether slave to his mother or to Alshandra. He were right about that, too. Now, being here among the Westfolk and having Pir, too, for my man, I do begin to see what freedom is, but truly, I see it with my mind, not my heart.’

‘Is that why you’re always waiting on everyone?’

Sidro started to answer, then hesitated, visibly thinking. ‘I suppose it be so,’ she said at last. ‘What we always knew before, it be comforting, somehow. My thanks, Branna! I’ll be thinking on that, I truly will. Though the Wise Ones, they do deserve what service we can pay them.’

‘That’s true.’ I just wish Neb could see it, Branna thought. Well, mayhap someday he will.

Yet, when she returned to their tent she found Neb sitting under a silver dweomer light, studying the book of herblore that she’d compiled back in her life as Jill. He looked up at her with watery eyes.

‘Is the mouldy smell bothering you?’ she said.

‘Not truly.’ He laid the book down, stretched, and yawned. ‘My eyes are just tired, that’s all. I’ll brew up some eyebright water on the morrow.’

‘You told me that Dallandra wanted you to study less.’

‘So?’ He spat out the word. ‘She doesn’t know everything.’

‘She knows more than you do.’

Branna regretted the words the moment she’d said them. She braced herself for one of their fights, but Neb merely shrugged and looked away.

‘So she does,’ he said at last. ‘For now.’

Branna said nothing. Outside the storm suddenly broke with a patter of rain on the tent roof.

As the alar continued making its slow way north, the rain followed. On the dry days the alar set up only a few tents, but a day or two out of every four it needed to make a full camp and wait out the storm, no matter how impatient its Wise One was. At least, Dallandra reminded herself, they never came upon any lingering snow.

‘A blessing,’ Dallandra remarked to Valandario. ‘I lived with snow for one whole winter, up in Cengarn, and I swear to all the gods I never ever want to see the stuff again.’

‘I don’t think I ever have.’ Val considered for a moment. ‘I’m glad, too.’

Dallandra glanced around the camp. Under a grey sky, streaked with near-black, the men were bustling around, setting up the tents for the night, while the women worked with the herds, hobbling the horses in case the coming storm broke with thunder and lightning. Wildfolk, children, and dogs raced through the camp in unruly packs, always in everyone’s way.

‘We’d better get inside,’ Dallandra said.

‘Yes, come to my tent, will you?’ Val said. ‘I keep thinking about Haen Marn, and we need to scry.’

Now that she was Val’s apprentice, Sidro had already brought her teacher’s possessions into the tent. Most lay piled neatly in the curve of the wall, since the alar would stay in this tent for a short time only, but her blankets and scrying materials lay spread out and ready. Sidro herself was hooking tent bags onto the wall near Val’s pillow.

‘Be there a want upon you to eat dinner now, Wise Ones?’ she said.

‘Not now, but soon,’ Valandario said. ‘My thanks, but I’ll call you when we’re ready.’

With a curtsey Sidro hurried out to leave them their privacy. Dallandra made a golden dweomer light and tossed it up to the tent roof, then sat down on a cushion opposite Valandario with the scrying cloth between them.

‘The thing is,’ Dallandra said, ‘no one’s been able to see the beastly island in any sort of vision. It may be impossible, because after all, it has to be surrounded by water, since it’s an island. But I keep wondering if there might be some way to reach it somehow.’

Val nodded, then assembled a handful of gems, picking and choosing from various pouches.

‘We wish to know about Haen Marn,’ Val said. ‘How may we see it for ourselves?’ She scattered the gems over her scrying cloth. For some while she studied the layout, whispering a word or two at moments. ‘Ah,’ she said at last, ‘something needs completing, something unfinished lingers in the question.’

‘Well, we rather knew that,’ Dallandra said.

Val frowned, then laid a finger on a topaz ovoid that lay on the seam between a red square and a black.

‘No, no, not just the question itself,’ Val said. ‘It’s some small thing, a step towards finding the answer.’

Dallandra reminded herself to hold her tongue and let her colleague do things her own way. Finally Val pointed out a gold bead that gleamed against a misty lavender square in one corner of the patchwork.

‘Treasure in the past,’ Val announced. ‘Or from the past.’ She raised her head and looked off into space, her mouth slack, her eyes expressionless as she waited for some thought or omen to rise into her mind. ‘The scroll.’ She smiled, herself again. ‘Dalla, Aderyn had a scroll that Evandar left for him. It was a set of evocations in the strangest language I’ve ever heard or seen. Do you know what happened to it?’

‘It’s in my tent,’ Dallandra said. ‘Gavantar gave it to me before he set sail for the Southern Isles. Aderyn had wanted me to have it, he said.’

‘Splendid! I had the privilege of working with the thing with Aderyn and Nevyn when I was just out of my apprenticeship. Evandar made sure that it was found at the same time as the obsidian pyramid. They didn’t seem to be connected back then, but he might have had some reason to leave them together.’

‘Evandar always had a reason.’ Dallandra got to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch it right now.’

The men of the alar had finished raising Dallandra’s tent. She ducked inside and found Neb arranging her bedding and goods. ‘Have you seen the grey tent bag with the symbols of Aethyr on it?’ Dallandra said. ‘They’re embroidered with purple yarn.’

‘I have indeed.’ Neb unpiled a few things, rummaged around in a heap of bags, and at last brought out the correct one. ‘Here we are. Why do you want it?’

‘It doesn’t concern you.’

He winced but said nothing more.

As she walked back to Valandario’s tent, Dallandra was thinking more about Neb than the scroll. He was not exactly disrespectful around her, his master in dweomer, but still, at moments his behaviour was a little too free and familiar, as if he’d known her for a long time. In a way, he had, of course, in his previous life, when as a young woman she’d been very much his inferior in dweomer workings. That was a long time ago, she reminded herself. I’d better make that clear to him. At these moments she was grateful to Grallezar all over again, for warning her about his wish that he was Nevyn still.

Inside her tent, Val had put away her scrying gems and cloth. Dallandra knelt under the dweomer light and brought out the wooden box holding the scroll. She laid the bag down, sketched out a circle of warding around it, then opened the box and brought out the scroll. The pabrus had turned brown over the years, and it threatened to split along the creases where it had been first rolled, then squashed into a box. Very carefully indeed she unrolled it and laid it down on the tent bag.

‘I should have left this in Mandra with Grallezar’s books,’ Dallandra said. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten I had it.’

‘It’s just as well you did,’ Val said, smiling. ‘Since we need it.’

They leaned closer, nearly head to head, to look it over.

‘As I remember,’ Valandario said, ‘there’s one invocation that’s incomplete. That may be what the scrying meant. So let’s start there. Ah, here it is!’

Valandario cleared her throat, then read the call aloud in a deliberately colourless voice. ‘Olduh umd nonci do a dooain de Iaida, O gah de poamal ca a nothoa ah avabh. Acare, ca, od zamran, lap ol zirdo noco olpirt de olpirt.’

‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ Dallandra said.

‘Oh yes. Although –’ Valandario frowned at the scroll. ‘Master Aderyn read these out in an odd way. He sounded every letter as the syllable it represents. Ol-de oo-me-deh deh-oh – like that.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense that way, either.’

‘It’s not in Elvish, that’s why. There’s a translation of everything down at the bottom –’

Dallandra looked where Val was pointing. ‘Right! Here it is!’ Dallandra read from the scroll. ‘I do call you in the name of the Highest, oh spirit of the palace on the in the midst of hyancith seas. Come, therefore, and show yourself to me for I serve the same Light of Lights.’

‘I’d say that the missing word has to come right here, “palace on the in the midst of hyacinth seas”.’ Valandario laid a delicate finger on the fragile scroll. ‘The palace on what? Could it be an island?’

‘It certainly could, and look! right here in the gloss, it says: “some say that the spirit word for island is hanmara”.’ Dallandra nearly choked on the name. ‘Hanmara,’ she repeated. ‘But Rori told me once that haen marn means black stone in the Dwarvish tongue.’

‘Oh, does it?’ Valandario broke into a grin. ‘Well, why can’t hanmara mean both? The island might appear to be made of black stone if we saw it on the spirit plane.’

‘Yes, that’s plausible.’

‘The palace on the black stone in the midst of hyacinth seas. I like the way that echoes in my mind.’

‘One of us needs to vibrate this call.’

‘I don’t want you to risk the child.’

The generosity of this simple statement – considering who that child had been in her previous life – left Dallandra speechless. Valandario misunderstood the silence.

‘Something nasty might answer, you know,’ Val said. ‘Aderyn was very careful about that, when he first had the scroll. So it had best be me.’

‘You’re probably right, but I’m going to come along when you do the working. Just in case.’

‘Good. I had no intentions of keeping you away, mind. Just stay outside the circle.’ Valandario paused, listening to the noise filtering through the tent walls. ‘We’re going to have to get away from camp, so we need to wait for a break in the rain.’

The rain fell all the next day, keeping everyone in camp. Dallandra took the opportunity to bring Neb into her tent for a private talk. She spoke in Deverrian to make sure that he understood her. When his yellow gnome followed him in, Dallandra shooed it out again. Even though the gnome lacked a true consciousness, she wanted no witnesses to what Neb might well find shaming.

‘Neb,’ she began, ‘there’s a common problem with dweomer apprentices, that they don’t work hard enough at their studies.’ She paused for a smile. ‘But I’d say you have the opposite problem. You need to work a little less and do more of the physical work around the camp, like helping with the horses.’

‘Indeed?’ Neb’s eyes flared in rebellion. ‘But I’ve got so much work to do already.’

‘Are the exercises I set you too much to finish in a day?’

‘They’re not. I’m studying herbcraft, too, is all, and I want time for that.’

‘You’ve got years ahead of you for all of that.’

‘You know, I’m human. I’ll only have a short life this time. I don’t see why I should waste any of it when I’ve got so much to learn.’

‘Why are you so sure your life will be short?’

“Well, because –’ Neb stopped, startled. ‘Well, won’t it be? Compared to a Westfolk life, I mean.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. But those who give their heart to dweomer, and you obviously have, tend to live a fair bit longer than ordinary folk. You of all people should know that.’

‘True spoken.’ He ducked his head and looked only at the floor cloth.

‘Now, I’ve taught several apprentices in my day, and for that matter, I was an apprentice myself once. I know how hard it is to hold back when you’re so eager to learn.’ She paused, as if thinking. ‘That was so long ago, truly. Nevyn only knew me as an apprentice, you know. Why, it must have been over four hundred years ago, now.’

‘I take your point.’ Neb looked up, and the rebellion came back into his eyes. ‘You’ve lived a cursed lot longer than I have, and you know a cursed lot more, too.’

‘Then why don’t you listen to what I say?’ Dallandra dropped any pretence of jollying him along. ‘I’m your master in dweomer now. You refused to listen to the last one, too, Rhegor that was, so long ago. Do you remember what came of that?’

Neb turned white around the mouth, and his hands clenched hard into fists.

‘I see you do,’ Dalla went on. ‘Well?’

Their gazes met and locked. The drip and patter of the rain outside sounded as loud as drumbeats until at last, he looked away.

‘I’ll help with the horses,’ Neb whispered. ‘Morning and night.’

‘Splendid!’ Dallandra arranged a friendly smile. ‘That gladdens my heart to hear.’

‘May I leave now?’ He was staring at the floor cloth.

‘You may, certainly.’

Neb got up and rushed out without looking her way. Stubborn colt! she thought. But he’ll grow into a splendid stallion one day.

In the late afternoon the rain slackened. A strong south wind sprang up, chivvying the fading storm and driving it off. Dallandra and Valandario walked to the edge of the camp and stood studying the sky. The damp wind felt pleasantly cool, not biting or chilly, and it carried the scent of new grass.

‘We could go out now, I suppose,’ Dallandra said. ‘I do love the feel of a spring wind.’

‘So did I,’ Val said, ‘but the ground’s still too wet. The grass will be soaked.’

‘Well, if this wind keeps up, it will dry out quickly. We should be able to do the ritual just at sunrise, once the astral tide turns toward Aethyr. We’ll probably travel all day tomorrow, and I’d like to experiment with that evocation before too long.’

‘Me too.’ Val grinned at her. ‘Sunrise it is. I’ll memorize the words tonight.’

In the chilly dawn Valandario left her tent and met Dallandra out by the horse herd. Both of them carried their ritual swords, wrapped in bits of cloth to keep off the damp. They were blunt blades of cheap metal to look at, but charged with a very different kind of power than that in a warrior’s muscles. For privacy’s sake they walked a good mile from the camp, then chose a spot suitable for the working. A gaggle of gnomes trailed after them, but as soon as Val unwrapped her sword, they rushed away to disappear.