The Shadow Isle
Authors: Katharine Kerr
Table of Contents
PART 1 - THE WESTLANDS SPRING, 1160
PART II - THE NORTHLANDS SPRING, 1160
Katharine Kerr’s Novels of Deverry,
The Silver Wyrm Cycle
Now available from DAW Books:
THE GOLD FALCON (#1) THE SPIRIT STONE (#2) THE SHADOW ISLE (#3)
Forthcoming from DAW:
THE SILVER MAGE (#4)
Copyright © 2008 by Katharine Kerr.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Books Collectors No. 1439
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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First Printing, May
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
.S.A.
For Elizabeth Pomada
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 DAW Books.
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 clamored 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.
When Laz woke next it was 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 smell 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 gray-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’ sweet-heart, 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 sandaled 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 served 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 gray, 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’ 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 traveler 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’ 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 gotten 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 jeweler 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 rumors 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 neighbors 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’ 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 harbored 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 gotten 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.