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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

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.

‘I’ve not seen anything like that before, either.’ Dougie shook his head in bafflement. ‘It looks like glass, though.’

‘It’s got no bubbles in it,’ Berwynna said. ‘So Uncle Mic said it can’t be glass. It comes from fire mountains, whatever they are.’

‘Well, he’s the one who’d know.’ Dougie turned to Angmar. ‘Could I have a look at that, my lady? I’m curious, is all.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Angmar said.

When Angmar set the pyramid down in front of him, Dougie picked it up and examined it, turning it around in his fingers. Tirn made a comment, which Angmar translated.

‘Don’t look into it too closely,’ she said. ‘It’s a rather odd thing. You don’t want to stare at it for too long.’

Dougie glanced at it out of the corner of his eye and saw the ordinary daylight in the great hall shining through black crystal. There’s naught to this, he thought, and looked directly down into the black depths through the squared-off tip. He heard Marnmara’s voice, coming nearer, sounding annoyed at something. He wanted to look up and ask her what the matter was, but the stone had trapped his gaze. He simply could not look away. Inside the black glow something appeared, something moved – a man, a strange slender man with pale skin, hair of an impossibly bright yellow, eyes of paint-pot blue, and lips as red as cherries.

The fellow was standing in the kitchen garden of Dougie’s family steading. He seemed to be staring right at Dougie, then turned and walked through the rows of cabbages till he reached the pair of apple trees by the stone wall, but the trees, Dougie realized, were young, barely strong enough to bear a couple of branches of fruit. The strange fellow stopped and pointed with his right hand at the ground between them. Over and over he gestured at the ground, then began to make a digging motion, using both hands like a hound’s front paws.

‘Dougie!’ Marnmara shouted his name. She grabbed his shoulder with one hand and shook him.

The spell broke. He looked up, dazed, unsure of exactly where he might be for a few beats of a heart. Marnmara turned to her mother and Tirn, set her hands on her hips, and began to lecture them in their own tongue. Tirn spoke a few feeble sounding words, then merely listened, staring at the table. Angmar, however, argued right back, waving a maternal finger in her daughter’s face. When Dougie put the pyramid onto the table, Marnmara stopped arguing long enough to snatch up the gem.

‘What did you see in it, Dougie?’ Marnmara said.

‘A strange-looking fellow standing between two apple trees. You might have warned me that the thing could work tricks like that.’

‘I didn’t know it could.’ Marnmara smiled briefly, then spoke to Tirn in their language. He looked utterly surprised and spoke a few words in reply. ‘He says he told you not to look into it.’

‘That’s true enough,’ Dougie said. ‘My apologies.’

Dougie decided that he didn’t like the way everyone was staring at him. He stood up and held out his hand to Berwynna.

‘I’ll be needing to go home soon.’

Together they walked down to the pier. Although he’d never seen the boatmen leave the great hall, there they were, manning the oars, ready to take him back across. Dougie shook his head hard. He felt drunk, but he’d only had half a tankard of Diarmud’s watered ale, and then another half of Angmar’s decent brew – hardly any drink at all.

‘Are you well?’ Berwynna said. ‘You’ve gone pale.’

‘I saw the strangest damned thing in that stone of Tirn’s. It was like a dream, some fellow pointing to the ground over and over. He seemed to think it was important, that bit of earth.’

‘Do you think it was a spirit?’ Berwynna turned thoughtful. ‘They say that spirits know where treasures are buried.’

‘Well, so they do – in old wives’ tales and suchlike. I wouldn’t set your heart on me finding a bucketful of gold.’

She laughed, then raised herself up on tip-toe and kissed him farewell.

The kiss kept Dougie warm during his long walk home, but the memory of his peculiar experience kept the kiss company. After he’d brooded on what he’d seen for a mile or two, the look of the fellow in the vision jogged his memory. He knew something about that fellow, he realized, but he’d forgotten the details.

Domnal Breich’s steading lay in a narrow valley twixt wooded hills. Over the years he’d built his family a rambling stone house and barn, surrounded by kitchen gardens and set off from the fields by a stone wall. The two apple trees of Dougie’s vision stood by the gate, at least twice as high as they’d appeared in the black gem. When he let himself in, he paused for a moment to look at the ground between them – ordinary enough dirt, as far as he could tell, soft from the recent rain and dusted with spring grass.

Domnal himself came out of the barn and hailed him. Although he still walked with a swagger, and his broad work-worn hands were as strong as ever, his dark brown hair sported grey streaks, and his moustache had gone grey as well.

‘Been at the island?’ Domnal said.

‘I have,’ Dougie said. ‘Here, Da, a thing I want to ask you. Do you remember a tale you told me – it was on my saint’s day, a fair many years ago now, and we went riding up to Haen Marn’s loch?’

‘The tale about Evandar, you mean, and how he saved my life?’

‘That’s the one! It was a snowy night, you said, and you were lost.’

‘Lost and doomed, I thought, truly. But he was a man of the Seelie Host. The cold meant naught to him. He took me to Haen Marn, where they kept me safe for the night.’

‘What did he look like? I can’t remember.’

‘He was tall and thin with bright yellow hair and eyes of the strangest blue, more like the sky just at twilight than an ordinary colour. A well-favoured fellow, but there was somewhat odd about his ears. They were long and curled like the bud of a lily. Ye gods! It’s been seventeen years now, but I can still see him as clear as clear in my memory.’

‘No doubt, since he saved your life.’

‘He did that, indeed, by getting me to Haen Marn and its hearth.’ Domnal paused to chew his moustache in thought. ‘You know, there’s somewhat that I still don’t understand. That night, I could have sworn that the island and its loch lay south of Ness. But the next time I saw it – in the spring, it was – it lay to the north, where it is now.’

‘If it could fly here from Cymru, why couldn’t it move itself again? Maybe it didn’t like its first nest.’

Domnal shrugged. ‘Mayhap so,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t explain it any other way.’

‘No doubt. My thanks, Da,’ Dougie said. ‘I was just wondering.’

That’s who I saw, Dougie thought, Evandar! He was frightened enough by the magical gem to consider avoiding Haen Marn from that day on, but he knew that he never could. For one thing, there was Mic and the profitable trips down to Din Edin. And of course, for another, there was Berwynna.

That night, when the family lay asleep, Dougie still waked, thinking over the vision in the gem. His curiosity had been well and truly roused. Through the narrow slit of window he could see the moon, full and bright in a clear sky, its light a further temptation. He wondered, in fact, if somehow Evandar had meant him to look into the gem at the full moon. The wondering prodded him to action. Although he shared a bed with his two younger brothers, Dougie as the eldest had the privilege of the spot on the edge. He slid out of bed without waking them, put his plaid on over his nightshirt, then climbed quietly down the ladder of their loft.

The dogs, asleep at the kitchen hearth, roused enough to sniff the air and recognize him. With a wag of tails they settled themselves again and went back to sleep. Dougie crept through the dark kitchen, barked his shins on a bench, stopped himself from swearing, and very carefully unbarred the door. It creaked, but no one called out at the sound. He slipped out into the moonlit farmyard, then took his boots from the doorstep and put them on.

A shovel stood leaning against the hen house. Dougie fetched it, then strode over to the apple trees. In the shadows cast by their branches, he found it hard to see, but he dug as carefully as he could to avoid damaging the tree roots. He’d not gone more than a foot down when the shovel clanked on metal. Dougie laid it aside, then dropped to his knees and felt around with one hand in the damp chilly dirt. His fingers touched something cold, hard, and dirt-encrusted. By feeling around he found its edges, then dug with both hands. Finally he managed to pull free a casket, about three feet long and two wide.

Behind him lantern light bloomed. Dougie twisted around to see Domnal, dressed only in his long nightshirt, walking over, a candle lantern held high.

‘What damned stupid thing are you –’ Domnal said, then stopped, staring. ‘God’s wounds! What’s that?’

‘I don’t know, Da.’ Dougie scrambled up, carrying the casket. ‘I had a dream, you see, about Evandar. He was telling me to dig here between the trees. I tried to ignore it, but it kept gnawing at me, like.’

‘Oh.’ Domnal lowered the lantern. ‘Well, let’s take it into the barn. I don’t want to wake your mother.’

His father’s sudden meekness troubled Dougie’s heart. He’d just lied to his Da, he realized, but somehow he hadn’t wanted to tell him about Tirn’s strange gem on Haen Marn – he just hadn’t, though he couldn’t say why.

In the barn Domnal hung the lantern on a nail above a little bench. Dougie laid the casket on the bench, then found an old sack and used it to wipe away the dirt. Its long time buried in the wet earth had turned the casket so green and crusty that he couldn’t tell if it were silver or pot metal. When he tried lifting it, the lid came away in his hands. Domnal took it from him.

‘What’s inside?’ Domnal said. ‘It looks like old rags.’

‘So it does,’ Dougie said. ‘I wonder if there’s somewhat inside them?’

One at a time Dougie peeled away the swaddlings – wads of rotten cloth on the outside, then a layer of oiled cloth, then layers of stained but sound cloth, until finally he came to a sack of boiled leather. Inside lay something solid and flat. Another casket? But when he slid it out, he found a book, bound in white leather, stained here and there from its internment. A black dragon decorated the front cover.

Dougie was too disappointed to swear. ‘I was hoping for a bit of treasure, Da.’ He opened the book, but in the candlelight all he could see was page after page of writing.

‘I wasn’t,’ Domnal said. ‘When Evandar’s involved, you never know what you’ll get, but you can wager it’ll be a strange thing.’ He took the empty casket and held it up to the light, twisting it this way and that as if he were looking for a maker’s mark. ‘It’s too filthy to see anything.’ He set the book down on the bench. ‘Put that book back in, lad, and we’ll hide it under some straw for the morrow.’

‘Well and good, then. Do you think this belongs to Haen Marn?’

‘I do. The night he saved me, Evandar told me that he needed a messenger, and it was going to be my son, when I had one. I’m supposing he meant someone to bring them this.’

‘And why couldn’t he have taken it over himself?’

‘Witches can’t travel across water, nor the Folk of the Seelie Host, either, or so I’ve always heard.’

‘So he needed a man to do his ferrying for him. I suppose that makes sense of a sort.’

‘Naught about Haen Marn makes sense.’ Domnal smiled with a bare twitch of his mouth. ‘I think me it might be dangerous to forget that.’

Dougie went back to bed. He woke just before sunrise, got up and dressed for the second time, then went out to the barn in the cold grey light to feed the cows. His brother Ian arrived soon after with his milking stool and pails. Dougie fed the horses, turned them out into pasture, then returned to the house to talk with Jehan. He found her in the kitchen, kneading a massive lump of bread dough.

Over the years she’d borne eight children and done plenty of farm work as well. She was stout and her hands were a mass of callouses, but despite the grey in her red hair and the lines around her green eyes, Dougie could see how beautiful she must have been when his father had won her.

‘I was thinking of going back out to Haen Marn today, Dougie said. ‘Will you be needing me for aught?’

‘Not truly,’ Jehan said. ‘But you know, it’s time you married your Berwynna and brought her home.’

‘I’d like naught better, Mother. Berwynna says she wants to marry me as well. It’s Lady Angmar who’s dead-set against it. She doesn’t want Berwynna to ever leave the island, not for a single day. She keeps saying it’s too dangerous.’

‘It is the local folk she fears? Once you two were married by Father Colm in the chapel, then all this stupid talk about witches would stop.’

‘It’s not that. She won’t explain why.’

‘You’re sure she has a real reason, then?’ Jehan frowned at him. ‘Or does she look upon us with scorn?’

Dougie shrugged to show that he didn’t know. He was suddenly afraid, wondering if his Wynni was a witch, after all. His father had told him that witches couldn’t cross water, hadn’t he? Jehan paused to push a stray lock of grey hair back behind her ear with her little finger.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Dougie said. ‘This very day, I’ll ask Lady Angmar about claiming my Berwynna. If she says me nay again, I’ll keep after her and see if I can find out if she truly doesn’t want the lass to leave the island or if she thinks I’m not worthy or suchlike.’

‘Well and good, then.’ Jehan looked up from the kneading. ‘You might as well know the truth.’

Before he left, Dougie put a clean shirt on under his plaid, then fetched the mysterious book from the barn. Since he was going to Haen Marn anyway, he figured, he might as well run Evandar’s errand for him.

Towards noon Lon brought a bucket of fish into the kitchen hut behind the manse. Berwynna put on her oldest tunic, wrapped a fragment of stained, fraying plaid around her for a skirt, and set to work cleaning the catch. Marnmara’s six cats rubbed round her ankles and whined. The orange brindle leapt up onto the workbench with its usual dirty paws. When she yelled and swatted, it jumped down again. Berwynna chopped off the fish heads and tails with efficient strokes of her long knife, then tossed them down at varying distances to give every cat a chance at this bounty. She gutted the fish, then threw the innards to the mewling horde as well.

Feeding the island took hard work. Despite the presence of so many large beasts in its water, the loch supplied netsful of fish all year long. Berwynna suspected that some sort of dweomer made the loch unusually productive, but neither her mother nor her sister would confirm her suspicion nor deny it, either. Man and dwarf, however, do not live by fish alone, as old Otho was fond of saying. The local villagers and farmers paid for Marnmara’s healing services with produce and what little grain they could spare. Mic’s coin bought beef, oats, and barley from the farmers on the richer lands to the south. Occasionally the boatmen managed to kill a deer. As well as medicinal herbs, Marnmara raised vegetables in her garden, and apple trees grew around Avain’s tower.

‘Wynni!’ Marnmara stood in the door of the kitchen hut. ‘Dougie’s just come across to the pier.’

‘Oh ye gods!’ Berwynna said. ‘Here I stink of fish.’

‘That won’t bother him. He’s besotted.’

Still, Berwynna scrubbed her hands with a scrap of soap and rinsed them in a bucket of well water. She wanted to change her filthy old clothes, but as she was hurrying towards the manse, she saw Dougie, just coming up the path, his tousled red hair gleaming in the sun. Under one arm he carried a bulky packet, wrapped in cloth.

‘There you are!’ Dougie said, smiling. ‘Ah, you look beautiful today, lass!’

‘My thanks!’ He is besotted, Berwynna thought. Thank God! ‘It gladdens my heart to see you, too.’

‘Good. I’m hoping to have a bit of a talk with you and your mother.’ He paused for a grin. ‘About us.’

Berwynna’s heart leapt and pounded. ‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know what there is to talk about.’

He merely grinned and reached out to catch her hand.

They found Angmar in the great hall, where she was sitting at a window with mending spread out on the low table in front of her. Dougie laid his parcel on the table, then bowed to her.

‘What’s all this?’ Angmar raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Usually you just sit yourself down without so much as a by-your-leave.’

‘Uh, my apologies, my lady.’ Dougie’s face turned a faint pink. ‘I’ve brought you a very strange gift, and I was hoping that we, I mean Wynni and I and you, could have a bit of a chat.’

‘If you’re going to ask me if you may marry her, save your breath. I’ll not agree.’

Dougie winced.

‘I don’t want her living off the island,’ Angmar continued.

‘Truly?’ Dougie said. ‘Or is that me and my kin aren’t grand enough for you?’

‘What? Naught of the sort! Dougie, I know not how or why, but in my soul I do know that me and mine will cause you grief one day. I’d beg you to put my daughter out of your heart.’

‘Mam!’ Berwynna could stay silent no longer. ‘But I love him. I want to marry Dougie.’

He turned her way and grinned. When Berwynna held out her hand, he clasped it and drew her close.

‘Wynni, heard you not one word of what I said?’ Angmar flopped her mending onto the table and scowled at both of them. ‘Avain did see much grief –’

‘What she sees in the water isn’t always true,’ Berwynna said. ‘Sometimes it’s wrong, or else it comes true in some odd way that’s more of a jest than anything. Well, doesn’t it?’

‘True enough.’ Angmar paused for a long sigh. ‘But –’

‘Besides,’ Berwynna hurried on before her mother could finish, ‘if you won’t let me leave the island, why can’t Dougie come live here?’

‘And what would your family say to that, then?’ Angmar glanced at Dougie. ‘With you the eldest son and all?’

‘They’d take a bit of persuading,’ Dougie said. ‘But I’d keep at it and wear them down in the end.’

‘Still, most like it be too dangerous. The isle be a jealous place, and I doubt me if you belong to it the way we do.’

Berwynna felt tears gathering just behind her eyes. She gave her mother the most piteous look she could manage and willed the tears to run. Her mother sighed with a shake of her head.

‘Wynni, Wynni! You children don’t understand, and there’s no way I can make you understand, truly.’ Angmar hesitated for a long moment. ‘But whist, whist, child, don’t weep so! Here, let me discuss this with Marnmara. But I’d not hope too much, either of you.’

She picked up the mending again and frowned at it with such concentration that Berwynna knew they’d been dismissed. She snuffled back her tears and wiped her eyes on her sleeve while Dougie patted her shoulder to comfort her. Hand in hand they went outside and sat down together on a wooden bench under an apple tree. Above them the white flowers were just peeking from their pale green buds.

‘Well now,’ Dougie said at last. ‘So much for the grand speech I’d stored up in my mind. I never got a chance to speak any of it.’

‘It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Mam’s got one of her ideas, and my dear sisters are dead-set against us, too, from what she said.’

‘I don’t understand. What did she mean about Avain seeing things?’

‘Oh, she sees visions in a bowl of water.’ Berwynna looked down, saw a pebble on the path, and kicked it viciously away. ‘Since she’s a mooncalf, Mam and Marnmara say that the angels or the saints are sending her messages that way. I don’t understand, and I don’t agree, but you heard Mam.’

‘I did, and a nasty thing it was to hear. I’m willing to risk a fair lot of grief for you, but I don’t want you sharing it.’

‘Bless you! But I’m willing to run the risk, too.’

Dougie threw his arms around her, drew her close, and kissed her. She laughed in sheer pleasure and took another kiss, but just as he reached for a third, she heard a warning snarl of a cough behind her. Dougie let her go. Berwynna turned on the bench and saw old Lonna, arms akimbo, glaring at her. Dougie rose and bowed to the elderly dwarf.

‘I’ll just be leaving, then,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Fare thee well, my lady.’

‘I’ll walk with you to the landing.’ She spoke to Lonna in Dwarvish. ‘Could you tell the boatmen to make ready?’

Lonna made a sound that might have been yes, then turned and stomped off towards the manse.

‘Ye gods!’ Dougie lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I’m beginning to understand why you want to get out of this place, truly.’

‘Well, I don’t want to leave it forever. I just want to see more of the world than Haen Marn.’ Berwynna paused, glancing around her. ‘There’s not much of it, is there? Just one small island, and every now and then I get to go over to the mainland with Marnmara when she gathers wild herbs or if someone’s ill in the village. Once we got to go to your grandfather’s dun, too, when the groom’s wife was so ill. That’s all I’ve ever seen, and all I’ve ever known, and oh Dougie, I’m sick to my heart of it!’

‘I can understand that.’ Dougie patted her hand, then raised it to his lips and kissed it, fish stains and all. ‘Let me think about this, lass. Mayhap I can come up with some scheme to get us married.’

Berwynna walked him down to the jetty and saw him off. For a brief while she lingered on the pier and considered the boathouse, a roof and walls with lake water for a floor. A narrow walkway ran along one side to give the boatmen access to the ladder that led up to the loft where they slept. Besides the magnificent dragon boat, the island owned two coracles, a large one for the fishing, and a small craft that Marnmara and Berwynna used for their rare trips to the mainland. These hung out of the water from pegs on the boathouse walls.

The question, Berwynna decided, was whether she could creep into the boathouse at night, get the coracle down, and lower it into the water without making a splash or other noise that would wake the boatmen. Not likely, she thought. If only she could, she could row across and meet Dougie, and perhaps Father Colm would marry them before her family caught her. Even less likely, since he thinks I’m a witch. She picked up a stone and hurled it into the water as hard as she could, then turned on her heel and stalked back to the manse.

In the great hall the others had gathered around Marnmara, who had come over to Angmar’s table to look at Dougie’s gift. Angmar sat to her right, the mending unnoticed in her lap, while Tirn stood just behind Marnmara and peered over her shoulder. When no Mainlanders were around, the island folk talked in one of the two languages that Angmar called ‘our home tongues.’ Since Tirn knew no Dwarvish, they spoke the mountain dialect of Deverrian whenever he joined them. In fact, he seemed to know it oddly well, better than any of the rest of them. Berwynna sat down on a bench opposite her mother just as Marnmara opened the sack and slid out its contents: a book, bound in white leather, with a black leather piece in the shape of a dragon upon the cover.

Tirn gasped, tried to choke back the noise, then coughed. Marnmara twisted around to look up at him.

‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘For a moment there I thought it was a book I used to own. That one had a black cover with a white dragon upon it.’

‘Indeed?’ Marnmara said. ‘What sort of book might it be? A grammarie?’

‘What’s that?’ Tirn looked puzzled. ‘I’ve never heard that word before.’

‘A book of spells.’ Marnmara was trying to suppress a grin.

‘Ah.’ Tirn hesitated, caught, then shrugged. ‘Well, it was that, truly.’

Marnmara allowed the grin to blossom. She opened the book randomly, then frowned at the page before her.

‘Be somewhat wrong?’ Angmar said.

‘I did hope I could read this,’ Marnmara said, ‘but I’ve not seen these letters ever before.’ She turned round again and looked Tirn full in the face. ‘Except right there, tattooed on your skin. What language be they?’

‘That of the Seelie Host,’ Tirn said.

Berwynna made the sign of the Holy Rood.

‘Truly?’ Angmar quirked one eyebrow. ‘Now, I myself have seen such letters before, and they were made by someone as much flesh and blood as you are.’

Tirn face’s turned scarlet between his tattoos and scars.

‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘You must know about the Ancients, then. Some call them the Westfolk, others the Ancients. Do they dwell in this country, too?’

‘I know not,’ Angmar said, ‘but they do dwell in my homeland. Indeed, the father of my daughters did have Westfolk blood in his veins.’ She leaned back to study his face. ‘I think me that you come from the place the Deverry folk call Annwn, not from Alban, no, nor Cymru nor Lloegr, either.’

‘You’ve caught me out, my lady.’ Tirn smiled and ducked his head in apology. ‘I didn’t want to say anything at first because I thought you’d never believe me. I didn’t realize that you too hale from Deverry.’

‘I come not from Deverry proper, but from the north of it, in the country known as Dwarveholt. Now, can you read that book?’

‘Alas, I cannot in any true sense. I can read well enough in three languages, but that of the Ancients isn’t one of them.’ Tirn raised his bandaged hand and pointed at the tattoo on his left cheek. ‘These marks? Among my kin they’re thought to bring good luck or the favour of the gods. They’re very old, and their meaning’s been long forgotten.’

Angmar continued studying his face, while Marnmara paged through the book, frowning at a bit of writing here and there and shaking her head over the lot.

‘What I can do,’ Tirn went on, ‘is sound out the letters, though I don’t know what many words mean. Well, truly, they’re not letters in the way that the holy book of this country is writ in letters. Each one stands for a full sound, what mayhap would take two or three letters in some other tongue.’

Everyone stared, puzzled, but Marnmara, who laid a finger on one mark. ‘This one?’ she said.

‘La,’ Tirn said, ‘and the next is sounded drah.’

‘Be you a scholar, then, Tirn?’ Berwynna said. ‘Father Colm does warn against the studying of books, saying it leads to sorcery.’

‘Does he?’ Tirn grinned at her. ‘He may be right, then, for the first time in his fat life.’

Berwynna began to laugh, then stifled the sound when Angmar glared at her. Tirn shifted his weight from foot to foot, then walked round to sit down on the same bench as Berwynna. She moved over to give him plenty of room. Angmar gave both of them a sour look.

‘Is somewhat wrong, my lady?’ Tirn said to Angmar.

‘There be Horsekin blood in your veins, bain’t?’ Angmar said.

Tirn blushed again, then nodded.

‘Mam, Mam!’ Marnmara looked up from the book with a sigh. ‘Matters it to you, with all of us so far from home?’

‘Not truly,’ Angmar said. ‘I find truth sweeter than lies, is all.’

‘It is, and I owe you an apology,’ Tirn said, ‘but I feared you’d have me killed or suchlike if you knew about the Horsekin.’

‘If you realized not that we be from Annwn like you,’ Angmar said with some asperity, ‘why did you think we might know about the Horsekin?’

Tirn blushed again, then spoke hurriedly. ‘I’m an outlaw among them, you see, and I’ll swear to the truth of that. They’d kill me if they ever got hold of me.’

‘Now, that I do believe,’ Angmar said, ‘because of the fear in your voice.’

Her mother and old Lonna had told Berwynna tales of the Horsekin, vicious killers who worshipped an evil demon named Alshandra. Now here was one of them, sitting next to her, a very ordinary man by the look of him, and badly injured to boot.

‘Do you believe in Alshandra, then?’ Berwynna said to him.

‘I don’t,’ Tirn said, ‘and that’s why I’m an outlaw.’

‘I see.’ Angmar rose and began to collect the mending in a basket. ‘Well and good, then.’

Berwynna followed her mother out of the great hall and up the stairs to Angmar’s room. She’d been planning on badgering Angmar about Dougie, but her mother’s mood had turned so grim that she thought better of the plan. Alone, they spoke in Dwarvish.

‘Mama, do you trust Tirn?’ Berwynna asked instead.

‘I don’t,’ Angmar said. ‘There’s somewhat more than a bit shifty about him beyond his Horsekin blood. I do believe him about being an outlaw, mind. I wonder, in fact, if his own kind gave him those burns and scars, a-torturing him somehow.’

‘Ych!’

‘Truly, they’re a cruel lot, the Horsekin. But be that as it may, Tirn knows lore that Marnmara needs if she’s to get us home again.’

‘Will we ever really go home,’ Berwynna said, ‘wherever that is?’

‘I have my hopes. It may not mean much to you, but I long to see your father again.’

‘Well, of course. I wish I knew him, too. My father. It has such a distant ring to it, doesn’t it? Even though you’ve told me about him, it’s not the same as knowing him.’

‘It’s not.’ Angmar allowed herself a long sigh. ‘I’ve tried to think of myself as a widow and stop longing for him, but deep in my heart I’m sure he’s still alive back home, if we could only get there. And I miss my homeland, too, the Dwarveholt.’

‘Mam, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to slight what you treasure, but the land means naught to me. This is the only home I’ve ever had.’

‘I do understand that. But I have hopes that someday you’ll have better and find a better man, too.’

This last was too much to bear. ‘Please, please, tell me why I mayn’t marry Dougie?’ Berwynna said. ‘I love him ever so much.’

‘I know, but ye gods, it would ache my heart to go home but leave you here with your Dougie. You’re young, child. There will be other men –’

‘I don’t want any of them.’

‘Dougie’s the only handsome lad you’ve ever known.’ Angmar managed a smile. ‘First love is the love that stings, or so they always say. But answer me this. Suppose you did marry your lad and go to live with him, and then we all disappeared without you. How would that feel?’

Berwynna felt the blood drain from her face. The thought of losing her family –

‘I see it doesn’t sit well with you,’ Angmar said. ‘Well, it could happen, were you to go live on Alban land. Haen Marn goes where it wills when it wills, and it doesn’t bother with giving fair warning.’

‘Then how come you let Marnmara go over to the mainland to heal the folk and suchlike?’

‘Because the island’s not going to go anywhere without her. That I know as surely as I know my own name.’

Berwynna bit back the bitter words that threatened to break free of her mouth. It’s always Mara, isn’t it? she thought. She’s the important one, never me.

Laz had told the truth when he’d told Angmar that he couldn’t read the Westfolk language. He regretted it bitterly, too, thanks to that book of spells. So much dweomer so near – but the book might as well lie on a table in Deverry for all the good it would do him. Wildfolk hunkered down on the table around the book, slender green gnomes, each with a cap made of rose petals. Now and then one of them would stretch out a timid finger and touch the edges of the page. When Marnmara threatened to swat them, they disappeared. For some while Laz watched Marnmara turn pages, her stare as fierce as a warrior’s, as if she could force the meaning from the alien letters by sheer will. ‘Not one word can I read,’ she announced. ‘And the whole thing be writ in the same markings.’

‘So it looked to me,’ Laz said, ‘and it aches my heart, I tell you.’

‘No doubt. Here.’ She pushed the heavy book across the table towards him. ‘Mayhap if you sound out more of the marks, you might find a word or two you know. I do hope that somehow this book holds the dweomer to take us all home again, though I do have this strange feeling in my heart that it be naught of the sort.’

‘Let me take a look, then.’

Using his wrists rather than his damaged hands, Laz managed to turn the book right side up in front of him. Marnmara moved to sit next to him and turn the pages when he asked. As he sounded out letters from the syllabary, he did come across words he knew, most of them useless, such as ‘next’, ‘then’, ‘and’, ‘is’ and the like. Still, Marnmara watched him so admiringly that he kept going.

‘Turn all the way back to the first page,’ Laz said finally. ‘If you’d be so kind.’

Marnmara did as he asked.

On the top of that first page a line of symbols, larger than the rest, had been carefully painted in red. Laz sounded them out several times. Thanks to the Westfolk custom of putting dots between words to set them apart, he managed to form them up into something he could guess at.

‘Now this first word,’ he said, ‘is a verb of some kind. That is, it’s the name of an act, a thing you do. I can tell by this sound at the beginning. It stands for “keh” and that means an action follows.’

A wide-eyed Mara nodded, taking it all in.

‘And this sound at the end,’ he continued, ‘means “how” or “why” one does this action. Alas! I don’t know what the action is. However, I’m fairly sure this next word means “a dragon”, because that name sounds much the same in several tongues, drahkanonen among the Westfolk, draeg in Deverrian, and drakonis among the Bardekians.’

‘You most certainly be a scholar, Tirn. Here, I think me you should study this book for all of us. Maybe more will come to you if you do contemplate it.’

‘Mayhap. We can hope.’

‘I –’ Mara paused, then turned around. ‘Be it that you wish somewhat, Wynni?’

Berwynna stood in the doorway, where, Laz realized, she’d been listening for some while, not that he saw anything wrong with her doing so. Marnmara, however, rose, shutting the book with a puff of dust.

‘Come take this upstairs to Tirn’s chamber,’ Marnmara said. ‘He can carry it not himself.’

‘You might say please, truly, once in a while.’ Berwynna walked over to the table.

‘Oh don’t be tedious!’ Mara shoved the book at her. ‘Here!’

With a scowl Berwynna took the book, so heavy that she clasped it to her chest with both arms, and trotted over to the stairs. She hesitated, glancing back, at the foot of them as if she might speak further, then shrugged and went on up.

‘Little sneak!’ Mara said. ‘She always be listening and prowling around. Now. We’d best work on your hands before dinner. Rest here a moment. I be going to fetch the medicaments.’

Laz suppressed a sigh. He needed more than a moment to brace himself for what lay ahead. Before Marnmara went upstairs, she spoke briefly to Lonna, the aged maidservant, who merely nodded for answer. Lonna went to the hearth, poured water from a big clay jar into an iron pot, then set the pot in the coals to heat. By the time Marnmara returned, carrying a small cloth sack, the water was steaming. Lonna set it on the table in front of Laz, then stomped off, muttering to herself. Marnmara took a handful of herbs out of the sack and dropped them into the water.

‘Let that cool for a moment,’ she said.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘May I ask you somewhat?’

‘You may, though I might not answer.’

‘Fair enough. Where did you learn so much about healing?’

‘I don’t know.’ She paused for a smile at his surprise. ‘When I were but a child, Old Lonna did tell me of a few simples. She did know how to bind a small wound and such crude lore, too. But then, once I did grow into a woman, I did have a dream.’ She hesitated, considering him. ‘Here, Tirn, since you be a scholar, tell me what you do think of this. In the dream I did find a door dug into the dirt of Haen Marn, out among the apple trees, that were. I did open the door and go down the stairs within. At the bottom was another door. I did open that. Herbs came pouring out, a great flood of dried herbs. I did scream, thinking they would smother me, but I woke to find the blanket over my face.’ She laughed with a toss of her head. ‘But here be the strange thing. From that day on, I did know herblore.’

‘I’d say you remembered it. The door led to your memory of such things.’

‘From a life lived before, mean you? It could well be. I remember naught of this, but my mother does assure me that once before I was the lady of this isle. Avain did recognize me, Mam tells me, on the very day I was born.’ She looked at him with her head cocked a little to one side, and her eyes wide, as if she were expecting him to challenge or dismiss her tale.

‘I’d believe it of Avain,’ Laz said. ‘She’s got a dweomer air about her.’

Marnmara smiled, perhaps relieved that he’d accepted her tale so easily.

‘It’s a great honour,’ Laz said, ‘to have such gifts.’

‘That’s what my mam does say. I get a-weary of it.’

‘What? Why?’

‘The gods have blessed you, she does say, so you must repay them and use your gifts as they wish. If I be the Lady of Haen Marn, then I have many a burden to take up.’ Her voice turned unsteady. ‘Whether I wish to lift them or no.’

‘I see. Well, no doubt you’ll be given the strength when you need it.’

She scowled at the surface of the water, then shrugged, as if she’d hoped for a different answer. Laz wanted to ask more, but he hesitated, afraid she’d resent his prying. She touched the surface of the water in the kettle with one finger, then dipped her hand in.

‘Just cool enough,’ she said. ‘Here, stretch out your hands, Tirn. We’ll have the bandages off.’

Laz gritted his teeth and did as she asked. Her touch was so light that pulling off the thin cloth caused him no pain, but the sight – both his hands were a mass of shiny pink scars. On his left hand the little finger had burned down to a stub of scar tissue, permanently fastened to the finger next to it, both of them useless. On the right hand the last three fingers formed one throbbing mass that he’d lost the power to move. In between the remaining fingers, and between each thumb and the meat of his hands, the flesh oozed a clear fluid as if it wept for its loss.

‘They heal, they heal,’ Marnmara said. ‘But not yet can we leave them be. We’ll do the left hand first.’

Laz plunged his hand into the water. The herb brew stung the oozing wounds like a liquid fire at first, then numbed them, though not quite enough. Marnmara put her own hands in the kettle, caught his, and pried the good fingers apart, one pair at a time, deliberately cracking open the scars to keep the fingers free and usable. As he always did, he swore under his breath the entire time, running through every foul oath he knew in the Gel da’Thae language to keep from fainting and disgracing himself. The right hand took less time and caused him less pain than the left, but by the time she finished, his head was swimming, and the skin of his face felt ice-cold and damp, especially around his mouth.

Marnmara laid his hands on top of the bandages and considered them. A trace of blood oozed between each treated pair of fingers.

‘Not much blood,’ she announced. ‘We’ll leave these open to the air for now.’ She patted his right arm just above the wrist. ‘Go rest.’

‘Gladly.’ Laz got up, steadied himself, and forced out a smile. ‘My thanks.’

He felt like an old man, hunched and staggering, as he made his way across the hall and up the stairs. His small chamber, bare except for a mattress on the floor and a basket for the extra pieces of clothing the women had made him, stood near the head of the stairs. The dragon book lay on the floor by the basket. He went in, shut the door with a nudge of his foot, then lay down and crossed his arms at the wrist over his chest.

‘That’s done for another day,’ he remarked to the hands. ‘Ye gods, I should have listened to Sidro. Don’t, she said, don’t touch the crystals together. Sound advice, but did I listen? Oh no! Not that I should complain, I suppose. What was that my charming mother used to say? Walk behind a mule, and you deserve to get kicked, that’s it.’

The worst thing, he decided, was that he could no longer remember why he’d wanted to bring the crystals together. Obviously it had been a stupid idea, yet he’d felt compelled – the word caught his attention. Compelled. Had some wyrd-dweomer lain inside the pair, waiting for a victim to bring their tips together so they could transport themselves and victim both to this island?

If so, one of them had made the trip safely, though he’d lost the other. He wondered if they might transport him back if he brought them together again. They might take him elsewhere, of course, somewhere far less hospitable than Haen Marn, or burn off the rest of his hands even if he did end up back in the Northlands. He sat up and considered his maimed hands. The idea of trusting himself to the crystals again terrified him. Yet curiosity nagged. Where was the white one, anyway?

After Dougie’s strange vision of the other day, he’d had Marnmara remove the pouch with the crystal from around his neck and put it under the clothing in the basket, hidden from curious eyes. When he tried moving his fingers, he found that he could control them, though it hurt whenever they rubbed against one another. He was healing, indeed, and the thought made him almost cheerful. Carefully, slowly, painfully, he managed to tip the basket over, find the pouch, and shake the black crystal out onto his pillow. In the sunlight coming through the tiny window, it gleamed, but sullenly, or so it seemed to him.

‘I’ll wager you can tell me where your brother lies,’ Laz said.

Laz set the crystal upright and looked down into its tip. He saw nothing at first, then murky images formed – an expanse of brownish grey, a lump of something that might have been wood. Ripples shimmered in the murk. A long narrow head appeared, two tiny eyes, a row of teeth, a neck. The head drew back. A spray of bubbles covered everything. Laz could draw only one conclusion: the white crystal sat at the bottom of the lake, far and forever out of his reach.

‘Good! Rot, for all I care!’

Getting the obsidian crystal back into its pouch, and the pouch into the basket, made his hands throb. Throbbing or no, he decided to put the dragon book somewhere safe rather than leaving it on the floor where Berwynna had placed it. Lifting such a heavy thing – the thought itself pained him. He glanced at the book, then swore aloud.

Just above the cover hovered a thickening in the air. A sprite, perhaps, only half-materialized? Yet the thing had a glow to it that sprites lacked, and an abstract shape. He could discern a disc of some colour that lay just beyond the ordinary colours of the world, an icy lavender? No, stranger still. Was it a spirit at all or some odd vortex of force? He lay down on the mattress to consider it at eye level. As if it knew he studied it, the glow sank into the book and was gone.

Once perhaps Laz might have called to that spirit and inquired about its nature. Now he was afraid, quite simply afraid, to attempt even the most basic dweomer. What if he failed, what if he learned that the enormous power he’d treasured had deserted him? He’d been wounded by the pair of crystals, he realized, his confidence broken as badly as his hands. He’d done a rash, stupid thing that had resulted in the worst pain he’d ever suffered. Worse yet, though, was thinking that the crystals had somehow compelled him, had gained power over him. A sorcerer, are you? he told himself. A pitiful fool, more like! On a tide of such dark thoughts he eventually fell asleep.

Laz woke long after the dinner hour, when the manor of Haen Marn already lay wrapped in silence for the night. During his convalescence hunger had deserted him, not that he’d ever eaten much in any given day. When he sat up, he noticed that the dragon book was glowing again. Ice-white flames, tipped in a peculiar blue, danced on its surface. Spirits. He had to be seeing spirits of Aethyr, he realized, and of a rank far more powerful than any Wildfolk.

‘I want that thing out of here!’

The glow disappeared. They had heard him. He felt sick, not with physical pain, but with shame that he’d turned into a coward. He got up and walked over to the window. Outside the night lay clear and still. Moonlight streaked the water of the loch with an illusory road, heading west. If only I could run along that back to the Northlands! Laz thought. Or if I could fly. He decided that the time had come for him to cast his cowardice aside and see what he could – or could not – do. It’s the only way you’ll ever heal, he told himself.

He stripped off his clothes with some difficulty, then stood naked at the window. When he called it forth, the mental image of the raven came to him. He worked with it, imagining the details of wing and head, until it seemed to live apart from his working as it stood on the windowsill. With a snap of will, he transferred his consciousness over to it. There he had an unexpected struggle, but at last it seemed that he looked out from the bird’s eyes at his body, slumped as if asleep on the floor.

Now came the hardest step, drawing the physical substance of his body into this new form. Once the process had come easily to him. That night he tried three times and failed at every attempt. No matter how hard he concentrated, how carefully he recited the working, his stubborn lump of flesh stayed where it was, and the raven remained an image, a body of light, only. His mind kept slipping back, as well. At one moment he would be looking out of the raven’s eyes; at the next, he’d be seeing the strip of wall in front of his body. Finally he realized that his body was panting for breath and dripping with sweat. He withdrew the raven image from the windowsill, banished it with the proper seal, and sat up, turning to lean against the wall while he let his breathing slow to normal.

‘Squittering shits!’ he said in the Gel da’Thae tongue. They were the only words that seemed appropriate.

Once he felt steady again, he got up and struggled back into his clothes. Why oh why didn’t I listen to Sisi? The question was going to torment him for the rest of his life.

Moving as quietly as he could, he went downstairs and out to the cooler air of the apple grove. White blossoms hung thick on the branches like trapped moonlight. That morning the trees had barely begun to bud. He stared at the blossoms while his heart pounded in terror.

‘How long did I sleep?’ he whispered.

‘Naught but a few hours,’ Marnmara said from behind him. ‘Time on Haen Marn runs at its own pace.’

Laz spun around to find her holding up a pierced-tin lantern. He could see her smiling in its dappled light.

‘You’ve not been here long, Tirn,’ Marnmara continued. ‘The island still has tricks to show you.’

‘So it seems. No wonder my hands are healing so quickly.’

‘That may be so, indeed.’

‘May I ask you a question? Where are we? How does this island move itself?’

‘As to the first, we be in a land called Alban. As to the second, I know not, nor do I know which is its true dwelling place. If we could return to the land that you and my mam call home, then mayhap I would know. My own dweomer should kindle then, like a flame shielded from the wind.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It be weak, here.’

‘What makes you think I have dweomer?’

‘Oh come now!’ She laughed aloud. ‘Did you not send the dragon book to my chamber just now?’

‘I – uh –’ Laz felt his face burn with a blush that, he hoped, the darkness would cover. Had the spirits taken his words as a command? Or had he merely hurt their tender feelings? Spirits could be extremely touchy. He had no idea which it was, although he wasn’t about to admit his ignorance. ‘So, the spell worked, did it?’

‘It did. The book did appear on white wings and settle onto a coffer in my chamber. So I did put it safely away inside.’

‘I thought it would be best if you kept it with you.’

‘Well and good, then.’ She hesitated briefly. ‘Oft have you told me you wished to make some repayment for my healing.’

‘I do, truly, if there’s aught of mine that you’d want.’

‘You know dweomer, don’t you? Teach me some.’

‘I could do that, certainly. But you must have knowledge of your own.’

Marnmara shook her head. ‘I have bits and shreds of such knowledge only. It comes to me in dreams or now and again in memory. I do feel – nay, I do know in my heart – that if I did know the first steps of the dweomer way, then I might walk far. But I know them not.’

‘Well and good, then. I can certainly teach you those.’

In the lantern light her smile turned soft, flickering, it seemed, like the candle flame itself. Although he’d always thought of her as beautiful, that night the thought carried a sexual interest that had escaped him when he’d been weak and in constant pain. He realized that he had started emitting the betraying scent of his interest, too, but he could take comfort in knowing that she’d not understand it, if indeed she could smell it at all.

Perhaps the look in his eyes had told her enough.

‘Tirn,’ she said, ‘there’s somewhat you need to know about me. I wear this body the way you wear a shirt. Don’t be taken in by it.’

She patted him on the shoulder with the same affection with which she’d pat one of her cats, then walked away, disappearing into the manse.

And what by the gods does she mean by that?

As he followed her inside, Laz felt both sad and profoundly weary in a way he’d never experienced before. At last he identified the sensation. He wanted to go home.

PART I

The Westlands Spring, 1160

Some say that the ancient mages of the Seven Cities, those long dead fortresses of beauty and magic, left a record of their secret work not in words or images but in stones and earth. Yet I for one call such a foolish tale, because I see not how it may be possible, no, not in the least.

The Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll

‘The crux of the problem,’ Valandario said, ‘is Laz. We want the pair of crystals. As far as we know, he still has them. Finding them means finding him.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Dallandra said. ‘I wish I knew whether or not he’s worth the effort of finding.’

‘Sidro says he is.’

‘Sidro loves him or thinks she does. She’s not a reliable advocate. From everything she’s told me about him, I certainly don’t understand how she could care so much about him.’

Valandario managed to shield her thought just in time. You’re a fine one to talk about her, Dalla, running off with that awful Evandar the way you did! They were communicating through the fire, Valandario in her chamber in Mandra, Dallandra in her tent some miles east.

‘So you’re convinced he’s still alive,’ Valandario said.

‘Not I.’ Dallandra’s image, floating above the bed of coals in the brazier, paused for a wry smile. ‘My guess would be that he’s dwelling on the spirit plane, waiting to be reborn. It’s Vek who’s convinced he’s still alive.’

‘Vek? Oh, yes, that Horsekin boy prophet.’

‘A Gel da’Thae boy prophet. There really is a difference.’

‘Very well, if you say so. Now, consider the vision Ebañy saw in the crystal, Evandar standing on Haen Marn. Do you think that means the crystal’s linked to the island?’

‘It might, but you can’t trust Evandar’s riddles to be logical. It certainly indicates that the book he was holding is linked to Haen Marn. But the crystal – I can’t say either way.’

‘Blast! I was afraid of that. Can we definitely say that wherever Haen Marn may be, it’s not the physical plane?’

‘Again, maybe. It’s surrounded by water, after all. Maybe it’s enough water to make scrying impossible.’

‘If it’s surrounded by water, how could Evandar even reach it? The play of forces in the water veil should have torn him apart.’

‘That’s a very good question. He probably couldn’t, and the view of Haen Marn that Salamander saw is just an image of the place. Probably. I don’t really know.’

‘In short, we can’t say anything useful about the wretched island at all, and I’m starting to think the beastly thing should just stay gone.’

Dallandra laughed. ‘Val, your image looks so sour! Not that I blame you, mind.’

‘Thank you, I suppose. The omens are so tangled! It’s enough to drive one daft.’

‘I couldn’t agree more about that. But tell me, how are you surviving the winter?’

‘Well, I miss everyone in the alar, but I have to admit that I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.’

For a while they spoke of trivial things, then broke the link between them. Valandario leaned back in her chair and considered the set of rough shelves across from her, a precious library of some fifty books protected by the solid walls of her chamber. For the first time in her life, Valandario had spent the winter inside a house rather than a tent.

In the winter the Westfolk and their herds usually moved south, until, by the shortest day in the year, they camped along the seacoast. Although it snowed only rarely that far south, it did rain three or four days out of every five. In a Westfolk tent, Grallezar’s library of dweomer books would have stood in as much danger as it had faced from the devotees of Alshandra back in Braemel, its original home, although the danger would have come from water, not fire.

Another place, however, had offered it shelter – Linalavenmandra, the new town that returning elven refugees had built at a natural harbour near the Deverry border. Although the name meant ‘sorrow but new hope’, its eight hundred inhabitants generally called it Mandra, simply ‘hope’. They were young people, by and large, fleeing the minutely structured life of the far distant Southern Isles where they’d been born. To them, having a Wise One, as the Westfolk term their dweomermasters, among them was not merely an honour, but a sign that their town had achieved the same status as the ancient cities they’d left behind.

So, when Valandario had volunteered to live in Mandra and tend Grallezar’s library, the townsfolk had responded by finding a house with room for her and the books both. She had moved all her belongings into a big upstairs chamber with a view of the sea from its window. Elaborately patterned Bardekian rugs covered the floor, her red and blue tent bags hung along the walls, embroidered cushions of green and purple lay piled on the narrow bed. The townsfolk had added a wooden table and chair so the Wise One could study her books in comfort and a small wooden coffer to keep her supply of oil, wicks, and clay lamps handy.

‘Wise One?’ Lara, the woman who owned the house with her husband, appeared in the doorway to the chamber. ‘We’re preparing dinner. Would you like some meat with your bread and soup?’

‘No, thank you. I’m not very hungry.’

Lara smiled, made a little bow, then silently shut the door again. Laradalpancora, to give her her full name, and her husband, Jinsavadelan, insisted on acting as if they were servants in Valandario’s house rather than the owners of the house in question, cooking, cleaning, mending her clothes, and generally fussing over her. They also fussed over each other.

‘They never would have let us marry back home,’ Lara told her one evening. ‘Even though we’d loved each other for years. So we had to come here.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Val said. ‘Who’s they, and why would they forbid it?’

‘The Council, of course. Jin’s birth-clan was too far above mine in rank.’ She held her head high with a defiant lift to her chin. ‘That doesn’t matter here.’

Jin smiled at her with such a depth of feeling that Val quietly got up and left the room. Seeing them so happy had woken an old grief. At times after that conversation, she missed Jav as badly as if he’d been murdered only a few years past.

Val used her work to blot her memories from her mind, reading for hours on end in pale sun or flickering candlelight until her eyes watered and ached. She was searching for information concerning a particularly powerful act of dweomer, one beyond the capabilities of any living dweomermaster, elven or human alike. Any one of Grallezar’s books might have held a clue. Fortunately, most of them were bilingual, with a roughly translated elven text on one page and the Gel da’Thae text facing it. Grallezar had wanted to make the knowledge they contained accessible to Westfolk dweomermasters as well her own people.

As Valandario read through each book, she copied any relevant passages onto a scroll made of pabrus, a writing material that had come over from the islands with the new settlers. One book in particular she kept on the table near her, but not for its information. Bound in black leather, decorated with a white appliqué of a dragon, it contained a translation into Gel da’Thae of a familiar work on dweomer, one she knew practically by heart. Its importance lay in its links to its previous owner, Laz Moj. According to Sidro, he’d made the translation and written it out in the book as well. Now and then Val would lay a hand upon it and try to pick up some impression of its absent scribe. Very slowly, an insight grew in her mind. Once she could articulate it, she presented it to Dallandra.

‘It’s about Laz’s book. It’s the antithesis of the one Evandar showed Ebañy in the vision crystal. The binding’s in the opposite colours, and the information inside it is well-known, while we don’t have any idea what may be in Evandar’s.’

‘That’s all true,’ Dallandra said.

‘So if the two books are linked by antithesis, they might echo the pair of crystals, the black and the white.’

‘In which case,’ Dalla continued the thought, ‘the missing book might also tell us about the crystals.’

‘Exactly! Furthermore, both the crystals and the island are shadows from some higher plane. Could it be that Haen Marn’s their real home, and they wanted to take Laz there for some reason?’

‘Or else they used him to get there. Salamander was planning on smashing the black one. I wonder if it was trying to escape.’

‘How would it have known?’ Val asked. ‘You don’t think it had some kind of consciousness, do you?’

‘I can’t say either way. I didn’t get to study it for very long.’

‘That’s not exactly helpful.’

Dallandra’s image grinned at her. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not thinking very clearly these days. It’s the baby, I suppose. I’m sinking to the level of a pregnant animal, all warm and broody like a mother dog.’ Her smile disappeared. ‘I hate it.’

‘At least it’s only temporary.’

‘That’s very true, and I thank the Star Goddesses for it.’

Dallandra’s image, floating over the glowing coals, suddenly wavered, faded, then returned to clarity.

‘Val, I have to leave,’ Dallandra said. ‘Someone’s calling for me, and they sound panicked.’

‘Dalla! Dalla!’ Branna was standing right outside the tent. ‘Vek’s having a seizure, and it’s a bad one.’

Dallandra grabbed the tent bag of medicinals she kept ready for these occasions and hurried outside. Wrapped in a heavy cloak, Branna stood waiting for her. A mist that fell just short of rain swirled around her in the grey light and beaded her blonde hair. Her grey gnome hunkered down next to her and squeezed handfuls of mud through its twiggy fingers.

‘He’s in Sidro and Pir’s tent,’ Branna said. ‘Over this way.’

The gnome dematerialized as they hurried through the maze of round tents, as strangely silent as winter camps always were, with life moved so resolutely inside. As usual, the winter rains had washed off their painted decorations, leaving strange ghostly stains on the leather, outlines to be repainted once the weather turned towards summer. In the grey light it seemed that the camp lay caught between two worlds of water and earth, scarcely there. Since Branna was striding along just ahead of her, Dallandra noticed that the girl’s dress hung thick with yellow-brown mud about her ankles. Her clogs sank into the ground with every step.

‘You really need to wear leggings and boots,’ Dallandra said. ‘I’ll get the women to make you some.’

‘I suppose so,’ Branna said. ‘I’m just so used to dresses, but truly, it’s impossible to keep them clean out here.’ She paused for a sigh. ‘It sounded so exciting, coming to live among the Westfolk. I didn’t realize what the winters would be like.’

‘They can be a bit grim, truly.’

‘I understand now why Salamander wintered with my uncle. I thought he was daft for it, until the rains started.’

‘Do you want to go home?’

‘I don’t. There’s too much to learn here. I just wish I could get really dry and warm.’

‘Well, it’s almost spring. Things will be better then.’

‘The days are getting longer, truly.’ Branna paused to extricate a clog from a particularly sticky lump of mud.

‘And in a few days we’ll move camp,’ Dallandra continued. ‘The ground will be cleaner in the new site.’

Sidro and Pir had pitched their newly made tent on the edge of the camp, not far from the horse herd. When Dallandra ducked inside, she saw Vek kneeling on the floor cloth and leaning, face forward, onto a supporting heap of leather cushions. He’d come of age the summer past, and as was usual among the Horsekin, he’d been bald until that point in his life. Still short and straight, his black hair clung to his dead-white skin. Sidro knelt beside him and wiped his sweaty face with a damp rag. Drool laced with pink stained the neckline of his dirty linen tunic.

‘I do think the worst be done with,’ Sidro said. ‘But he did bite his tongue afore I could get him turned over and sitting up like this.’

Branna hovered back in the curve of the wall to watch. Dallandra laid her bag down, then knelt at Vek’s other side. When she laid her hand on his face, she found it cold and clammy. He looked at her out of one dark eye.

‘I’ve brought your drops,’ Dallandra said. ‘Let me just get them out.’

In response he let his mouth hang open. She rummaged through the tent bag and found the tiny glass vial, filled with an extremely potent tincture of valerian. It smelled horrible and must have tasted worse, but Vek neither squirmed nor made a face when she used the glass stopper to drip a small quantity into his mouth. She could see the cut on the side of his tongue – not big enough to worry about, she decided.

‘You know this will help. Good lad!’ Dallandra made her voice soothing and soft, as if she were speaking to a small child instead of a boy who was at least thirteen summers old. She was never sure how much he understood when he was in this condition. Afterwards he could never remember.

Sidro handed her a cup of spiced honey water. Dallandra helped Vek drink a few sips to wash the medicine down and the taste out of his mouth. She gave the cup back to Sidro, then patted him on the shoulder.

‘You just rest now,’ Dallandra said. ‘Sidro, will it be all right if he stays here with you?’

‘Of course. Help me lie him down on those blankets over there. Pir be out with the horses, but he’d not mind anyway were he here.’

‘I’ll help.’ Branna stepped forward. ‘Dalla, you shouldn’t lift anything heavy.’

‘Perhaps not.’ Dallandra laid her hands on her swollen stomach, hanging over the waist of her leather leggings – she no longer bothered to lace them up in front. ‘This is the part about being with child that I hated before, feeling so bloated and awkward.’

‘True spoken,’ Sidro said. ‘But I’d put up with that again gladly to give Pir a child. He does so want one.’ She smiled. ‘He’s not like Laz.’

‘I’ve no doubt you’ll get your wish soon. You’re both in good health.’

‘So did Exalted Mother Grallezar say. She did tell me that when one woman in a circle be with child, the rest be sure to follow. The smell in the air does induce fertility.’ Sidro grinned and took a deep breath. ‘I do hope she be right.’

‘She generally is,’ Dalla said.

As if she’d heard, the female child in Dallandra’s womb kicked her, an unpleasant sensation though not precisely a pain, as she’d missed the kidneys – this time. Soon, little one, Dallandra thought, soon you’ll be out, and we’ll both be free of this.

Between them Branna and Sidro hauled Vek to his feet. He threw an arm over each of their shoulders and let them drag him to the heap of blankets over by the wall of the tent. Once he was lying down comfortably, the two women came back to distribute the leather cushions and sit with Dallandra. Sidro ran both hands through her raven-dark hair, still too short to braid thanks to her humiliation of the summer before, and pushed it back from her face.

‘And what about you, Branna?’ Sidro said. ‘Do you too long for a child?’

Branna’s grey gnome popped into materialization and shook its head in a resounding no.

‘What’s this?’ Branna said to the gnome. ‘You’d be jealous, I suppose.’ She brought her attention back to Sidro. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean I’m an awful unnatural woman, but I don’t really want a child just now. I want to keep studying dweomer. A baby would be a nuisance.’

‘Not here,’ Dallandra said, ‘not among the Westfolk. We prize our children so much that you’ll have plenty of help when you do give birth.’

‘Good. If he got me with child, Neb doubtless would gloat over it, but I’ll wager he wouldn’t be any help with the baby. Although I might be doing him a disservice. He’s not like the men I grew up with.’

‘I’m glad you can see that.’ Dallandra smiled at her. ‘An honour-bound warrior he’s not.’

Over on the blankets Vek let out a long snore, then turned over on his side and nestled down, his back to the women.

‘Good, he’s asleep,’ Dallandra said. ‘That’s the best thing for him.’

‘So it is,’ Sidro said, then lowered her voice to a murmur. ‘He had one of his visions during the fit.’

‘Did he see Laz or the black stone?’ Dallandra leaned closer and spoke softly.

‘Alas, he did not. He spoke of a tower that reached to the sky, but it turned to smoke.’

‘The tower did?’

‘It turned to a pillar of smoke whilst it sent out flames, he did say. Do you think his mind did fasten on the burning of Zakh Gral? The men here have talked of little else all winter long.’

‘It seems likely, truly. Did he say anything about where this tower was?’

‘He did not, but many of our people – the Gel da’Thae, that be – did die in the flames. He wept to see it. Then spirits came down from heaven and spread snow upon the burning, and the snow did fall everywhere and ruin a harvest. The oats and barley in the field do die, he cried out. The snow were ashes, I suppose.’ Sidro frowned, thinking. ‘But there were no tilled fields near Zakh Gral. The rakzanir did speak of settling slave farmers around it to feed the soldiers stationed there, but that were to happen the next year. Our food did come from the cities.’

‘Well, I don’t think we can expect every detail of his visions to make perfect sense.’ Dallandra glanced at Vek to make sure that he was still sound asleep. ‘This one seems clearer than the others, though, so I can see why you’re trying to puzzle it out.

‘So it be.’ Sidro paused for a sigh. ‘I think me, Wise One, that we’ll be having a harvest of omens this summer.’

‘And few of them good.’ Dallandra had meant to speak lightly, but her words sprang to life in her mouth and burned.

Branna and Sidro both turned towards her and waited, studying her face. ‘More trouble, I suppose,’ Dallandra said. ‘The Star Goddesses only know what, though I’ve no doubt we’ll find out for ourselves soon enough.’

‘True spoken,’ Branna said, ‘or too soon.’

Branna’s grey gnome grinned and nodded, then slowly, one bit at a time, disappeared.

On the morrow the rain slackened. A wind sprang up from the south and brought not warmth but the promise of it as it drove the clouds from the sky. Prince Daralanteriel gave the order to his royal alar to break camp. Besides his wife, Carra, and their children, the prince travelled with his banadar or warleader, his bard, his dweomermasters, and a hundred warriors, most of them archers, along with their wives and children, or in the case of the women archers, their husbands and children. Getting this mob on the road took time.

As well as the crowd of Westfolk, the alar travelled with herds of horses, flocks of sheep, and packs of dogs, trained for herding or hunting. Although the People were adept at packing up their goods, their livestock, and their tents, by the time they got moving along the predetermined route, the sun would be well on its way to midday. They’d travel until some hours before sunset, when everyone would stop to allow the stock to graze before night fall. In the short days of winter’s end, they managed perhaps ten miles a day.

Dallandra thanked the Star Goddesses for the slow pace. She was too pregnant to ride astride for long. Walking would have tired her after a few miles, and sitting on a travois to be dragged along would have shaken her bones and the baby both. With the ground still saturated from the winter rains, using a wagon would have been out of the question even if the Westfolk had possessed such a thing. Fortunately Grallezar had a solution.

‘Among my people,’ the Gel da’Thae said, ‘we have a thing called a mother’s saddle. It be long from pommel to cantle, and both stirrups, they hang on one side.’

‘I saw something similar in Deverry,’ Dallandra said. ‘I’d be afraid to use one. What if something frightens my horse, and it tries to throw me? I couldn’t get free in time to save myself and the child.’

‘With Pir leading your horse, think you it will spook at shadows?’

Dallandra grinned at her. ‘I’d forgotten about Pir. Do you think we can put together one of those saddles?’

‘Something like it at the least.’

It took Dallandra some days to grow used to the new saddle. She had to sit extremely straight to keep her back from hurting, which meant counterbalancing the weight of her pregnancy. She felt her posture as awkward and ugly both. By the afternoons she wanted nothing more than to call an early halt, but with the memory of omens burning in her mouth, she set her teeth against the discomfort and said nothing. At least with the horse mage walking along beside her, she knew that she could trust her mount, who seemed to view Pir as a wiser sort of horse. A tall lean fellow, Pir’s dark hair hung in an odd style all his own. He’d cropped most of it off short but left a wide stripe down the middle of his head from brow to neck that was long enough to braid like a horse’s mane. At moments Dallandra’s mare would snuffle into the mane or onto Pir’s shoulder, as if reassuring herself that he was still there.

The royal alar made its last camp before reaching Mandra late on a day that most definitely felt like spring. Dallandra contacted Valandario while her apprentice and some of Calonderiel’s men set up her tent.

‘We’ll arrive just after noon, I think,’ Dallandra told her.

‘Very well,’ Val said. ‘I’ll tell the mayor. The townsfolk will want to greet the prince properly.’

‘What does properly mean to them?’

‘Lots of speeches. Tell Dar to have one ready.’

‘Devaberiel’s travelling with us. The two of them can work something up.’

‘Excellent! It would be a good idea for Dar to ride into town with some sort of ceremony around him, banners, pennants that kind of thing. Does he have more than that old shabby one he took to the war?’

‘He does. Carra and some of the women have been stitching all winter long.’

‘Good. The town will like that.’

On the morrow, the alar set out with the prince and his banadar in the lead, dressed in their best clothes and riding golden horses. Behind them came Dallandra and the royal bard, Devaberiel, also wearing what finery they owned. Next rode the archers and swordsmen, with the rest of the alar bringing up the rear with the flocks and herds. Some of the older children rode in front of the warriors and carried the banners and pennants of Daralanteriel’s royal line, embroidered and appliquéd with the red rose and the seven stars of the cities of the far western mountains.

For those last few miles, the road, a rough affair of mud and gravel, ran along the tops of the sea cliffs. Long before they reached its walls, they came to fields of sprouting grain and orchards of young apple trees, spindly and doubtless still barren, but a promise of fruit to come. The farmers working in the fields rushed to the stone fences to call out ‘the prince! the prince! here’s to our prince!’ as the alar rode on by. Daralanteriel bowed from the saddle and waved to acknowledge them all.

At last in the distance they saw the roofs of Mandra. All around the town the wild grass still waved, a common ground for milk cows at most times, but the townsfolk had put up a temporary enclosure to keep the royal alar’s herds and flocks from wandering too close to the cliff edge. Herdsmen were waiting to help turn the stock inside the rough walls, thrown together out of driftwood and stones, broken planks and branches. At the sight of the prince, the herdsmen rode out, cheering. Dar waved and smiled.

Everything seemed to be going splendidly, in fact, until the town herdsmen began to help round up the flocks and herds following the procession. Up near the front as she was, Dallandra heard angry shouts, yells, cries of fear and alarm, but she could see nothing. Everyone halted except for the dogs, who rushed back and forth, barking. The archers and swordsmen in the middle of the line of march began to turn their horses to ride back. The entire line broke apart as riders drifted into the meadows lining the road.

‘Ye gods!’ Pir said. ‘Those shouts – some of them be Gel da’Thae.’

Too late Dallandra remembered just how many Gel da’Thae rode with the alar – the men Pir had brought with him, the remnant of Grallezar’s bodyguard, and Grallezar herself. Over the winter they’d become loyal friends to the other members of the alar, but in the eyes of the refugees who’d settled Mandra, they’d be Meradan, demons, and little else. Swearing under his breath, Calonderiel turned his horse out of line and galloped back. As he passed the squads of swordsmen, he called to them to follow.

Dallandra’s dappled grey mare danced nervously in the road and pulled at the reins. Pir laid a hand on the horse’s neck, up under her mane, and she quieted.

‘My thanks,’ Dallandra said. ‘Can you see what’s happening back there?’

‘I can’t,’ Pir said. ‘But the shouting’s died down.’

Calonderiel returned shortly after with Grallezar riding beside him. Grallezar guided her stolid chestnut gelding up to Dallandra and leaned over to speak to her while Calonderiel went on to confer with Dar.

‘We Gel da’Thae,’ Grallezar said, ‘had best avoid strife. I did tell the banadar that we be willing to camp elsewhere, up the north-running road a fair piece, say. Then when you all leave Mandra, we shall rejoin you as you pass by.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Dallandra said, ‘I should have thought –’

‘Nah, nah, nah, we all should have thought! Be not so apologetic, my friend.’ Grallezar smiled, revealing her pointed teeth. ‘It be no great difficulty for us to all turn out of line. Sidro, though, I would leave with you. She does look much like a Deverry woman, and she does take good care of you.’

‘True, and Vek had best stay with her in case he has another seizure.’

‘Just so.’ Grallezar turned to Pir. ‘The mare that the Wise One rides, will she be calm enough now?’

‘I’d best walk beside her into town,’ Pir said. ‘When she dismounts, then will I head north to join you. None will notice a mere one of us.’

‘True enough,’ Grallezar said. ‘What is that they say in Deverry? Done, then!’

Daralanteriel rode back along the line of march to reassure the townsfolk while Calonderiel restored order to the alar itself. The Gel da’Thae contingent sorted out their pack horses and tents, then headed north under the grim eyes of the local herdsmen.

When Daralanteriel rode back to his place at the head of the line, his face showed no trace of emotion, a sure sign that he was hiding some strong feeling – worry, Dalla assumed. No one had ever taught him how to rule even a small territory, since no one had ever guessed that some day he would have actual subjects in an actual town. As the procession moved forward again, Carra, his wife, urged her horse up next to his and took over the job of acknowledging his admirers. His children followed, aping their mother’s smiles and waves. Judging from the cheers, the townspeople and farmfolk lining the road were well pleased.

At the edge of town Valandario waited. Beside her stood a tall pale-haired man, dressed in a long tunic clasped with a distinctive broad belt, beaded in a pattern of blue circles and triangles. Valandario introduced him to the prince as the town mayor. When Daralanteriel dismounted, the mayor knelt to him.

‘Please get up,’ Dar said. ‘There’s no use in you kneeling in cold mud.’

The mayor laughed, then rose and launched into a speech of welcome. Other townsfolk came running to usher the prince’s retinue inside with speeches of their own. In the resulting confusion, Dallandra managed to slip away and join Valandario.

‘Let’s go to my chamber,’ Val said. ‘It’ll be quiet there.’

As they walked through the muddy streets, Dallandra marvelled at the town around them. Out in the grass few trees grew. Traders had hauled in some timber in return for the salt that the townsfolk harvested from the sea. The farmers had dug stones from their new fields and collected driftwood from the beaches to build a strange collection of squat, thatch-roofed cottages. Most of the walls stood at odd angles; some bristled with assemblages of random driftwood. Smoke from the hearths and lime from the sea birds stained roofs and walls. Behind most houses cows and chickens lived in shelters built of blocks of cut sod. A whiff of sewage hung in the air. Still, the men and women who lived in those houses weren’t Roundears, a marvel in itself. They’re my people, Dallandra thought, but they know things we’ve forgotten for a thousand years.

‘It’s still small,’ Valandario said, ‘but we’re expecting several boatloads of new settlers by the autumn.’

‘We?’ Dallandra said, smiling.

‘I’ve become part of the town, yes, at least for the winters.’

‘I’m going to need you to come with us when we leave.’

‘And I’m ready to ride, or at least, I will be once I finish packing up my things. Don’t worry about that.’ Val paused for a glance around. ‘But I’m hoping to come back in the autumn.’

The house in which Valandario was staying was a grander affair than most, two storeys high, the lower of stone, the upper of timber planks, with proper wooden shutters at every window and a slate roof. Inside the fenced yard chickens pecked and squawked in the spring greenery. Although she couldn’t see it, Dallandra could smell a cow as well.

‘Your hosts must be prosperous people,’ Dallandra said.

‘Yes, they’re the town potters,’ Valandario said. ‘The kiln’s round back, and their shop’s on the ground floor. And Jin’s teaching some apprentices how to make pabrus, too, as well as how to throw pots.’ She pointed to the side of the house. ‘We’ll go up the side stairs here.’

The creaky wooden stairs led to an off-kilter door of planks laced together with rope. Val opened it and ushered Dallandra inside to the kitchen, a big room with a brick hearth at one end, a long table in the middle, and crates and barrels along a side wall. Doorways led to various rooms, including the Wise One’s. Just like her old tent, Valandario’s chamber gleamed with bright colours on the walls and on the floor. Blankets and a pile of cushions lay on the narrow bed jammed against one wall.

‘Do sit down.’ Valandario waved at the bed. ‘You look like you could use a rest. Is the baby due soon?’

‘A pair of months.’ Dallandra sat down with a sigh of gratitude. ‘About. I’m not sure when exactly. Probably she’ll come at the most inconvenient moment.’

‘Babies seem to, yes. I know this is practically treason to our kind, but I’m glad I never had one.’

‘Well, I’m hoping that things work out better for this soul that they did the last time he was born. I won’t abandon him this time, for one thing.’

Valandario stared at her with abruptly cold eyes. ‘Are you saying that it’s Loddlaen?’ Her voice dwindled to a whisper on the name.

Too late Dallandra remembered who had murdered Valandario’s only lover. Val stood so still that it seemed she’d stopped breathing, waiting for the answer. From outside came the noise of the inhabitants returning to their town after greeting the prince – laughter, chatter, snatches of song, the barking of dogs and the high-pitched shrieks of children.

‘I won’t lie to you,’ Dallandra said at last. ‘Yes, it is, but she – and notice that I said she – she’ll wear a different personality this time around.’

‘Of course.’ Val turned away and walked over to the window. ‘Forgive me!’ She paused again, while the everyday noises from outside seemed to mock old griefs. ‘It would be a terrible thing to carry grudges from life to life,’ Val said at last. ‘Maybe that’s one reason we don’t remember lives, so we can let old hatreds die.’ Again a long pause, until the laughter and shouting had moved on. ‘I won’t revive mine, I promise you. The news just took me by surprise, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry I let it slip like that. I should have prepared you –’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Yet Valandario continued staring out of the window. ‘You were gone when the murder happened. I can’t expect you to remember the particulars.’ Her voice nearly broke on the word ‘particulars’. ‘It’s just that all sorts of little things have happened, just lately, to remind me of Jav.’ She turned around at last. Her eyes glistened with tears. ‘And I still miss him. Elven lives are so long, no one stays together forever, but for us, everything ended too soon.’

‘Very much too soon, yes.’

Val went back to her work table. For a moment she stood, letting her fingers trail across the tooled leather cover of a volume lying there; then with a sigh she sat down in one of the two chairs standing behind it.

‘I’ve put together some interesting information about crystals.’ Val’s voice was steady again. ‘I’ve compiled a set of notes for you. Grallezar brought us some immensely valuable books.’

For some hours they discussed Valandario’s findings. When the light in the chamber faded, Val lit candles. Sidro came and went, bringing food and news. With warm bread came the information that Branna had gone with Grallezar and the Gel da’Thae. Chunks of roast lamb accompanied the welcome bulletin that thanks to a speech that Devaberiel had composed, Prince Daralanteriel had impressed everyone at the banquet. Along with a flask of Bardek wine for Val, Sidro reported that Calonderiel was discussing the town’s defence with the mayor and the leader of its ill-armed militia.

Dallandra was resting on the bed in Valandario’s chamber when Sidro came in for the last time, carrying a pottery cup of boiled milk with honey for her to drink. At her table Valandario had spread out her scrying cloths. Sidro noticed them and lingered for a moment.

‘I did want to ask you, Wise One,’ Sidro said to Val, ‘if there be aught I may do to help you find Laz. I know but a little dweomer, though it would gladden my heart to learn more, but what I have I’ll happily use if it would give you any aid.’

‘Thank you,’ Val said, ‘but I don’t know –’

‘Val,’ Dallandra interrupted in Elvish, ‘did you know that Sidro can read and write?’

‘I didn’t, no,’ Val answered in the same. ‘That might be useful.’

‘It’s time to record your gem scrying.’ Dallandra gave her a stern look over the rim of the cup. ‘The lore’s too valuable to risk losing.’

‘Oh.’ Valandario looked surprised, then nodded. ‘Sidro,’ she said in Deverrian, ‘there’s indeed somewhat you can do for me. How would you like to learn how to use these cloths and gems to search for omens?’

‘That would gladden my heart indeed.’

‘Good. I’d like you to write down what I teach you, too. Could you do that?’

‘I can, though the only letters I know be Horsekin ones.’

‘It won’t take you long to learn the Deverrian letters,’ Dallandra said. ‘I can teach you. There’s only thirty of them.’

‘Oh, well then!’ Sidro smiled at her. ‘It be easy, truly.’

‘Splendid!’ Valandario said. ‘We’ll start on the morrow, but for now, why don’t you just sit down and watch, to get an idea of the process, I mean.’

Sidro pulled a chair up to the table and sat down while Valandario went to a hanging tent bag and brought out a leather pouch of gems. Dallandra meant to watch the lesson, but the hot milk combined with her weariness from travelling, and she felt asleep with the empty cup clasped in her hands.

Valandario took the cup from Dallandra without waking her, set it down outside the door, then seated herself at the table next to an eager Sidro. She poured out her pouch of gems, then chose twenty for a simple reading. In the candlelight they glittered, a chaotic rainbow. A crowd of sprites appeared to dart among the glints of coloured light. One settled briefly on Sidro’s hair, then darted away again.

‘We want four each of the five colours,’ Val told her new apprentice. ‘They represent the elements and the Aethyr, of course.’ She put the rest of the gems away. ‘Now, if we were considering an important matter, we’d add other colours, but this will do for now.’

Valandario spread out the scrying cloth, a patchwork of Bardek silks, some squares embroidered with symbols, others plain. Sidro listened carefully as Val explained each symbol.

‘I’ll repeat this on the morrow,’ Val said, ‘so you can write it down. At the simplest level, a gem that falls upon its own colour represents what most people would call good fortune. It’s all based on the compatibility or incompatibility of the elements.’

‘I see.’ Sidro leaned a little closer to study the cloth. ‘So if a blue stone, it do fall upon a fire square, then that be a dangerous sign?’

‘Exactly. Very good!’

Valandario shook the gems in her cupped hands like elven dice, then strewed them out with a careful motion of her wrist. For a moment she studied the pattern formed.

‘What do you think this means?’ Val said. ‘I know you don’t know all of the system yet. Just give me an impression.’

Sidro frowned, tilting her head this way and that as she studied the layout from different angles. ‘Forgive me,’ she said at last, ‘but I can see naught in it.’

‘Then you’re going to do well at this.’ Val grinned at her. ‘I can’t, either. This is the most confused reading I’ve ever seen, probably because we’re doing it just as a lesson.’ She let the grin fade. ‘I hope, anyway.’

‘What would it mean if you were asking it about the future? Aught?’

‘I’d have to say that it signified some sort of standoff, a balance of forces that were locked together like this.’ Val held up her hands, hooked her fingers together, and made a pulling motion. ‘I couldn’t say between what or whom, since we never focused our minds on a particular question.’ She felt a sudden irritation, as if a stinging insect were flying around and around her head. The feeling was so strong that she lifted a hand to brush it away but found nothing. ‘Let’s put these back in their pouch. I must be more tired than I thought.’

‘It were a long day, truly,’ Sidro said. ‘I’ll fetch the banadar so he can carry his lady to their tent.’

That night Valandario dreamt about Jav and the black crystal pyramid. They stood together on a sea cliff and looked down at a heap of stones on the beach below. He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the waves. Finally she woke to a sudden understanding.

‘The place where he found the crystal. That’s what he was trying to show me.’

The grey light of dawn filled the room. Valandario got up and dressed while she considered the meaning of the dream. Could there be another crystal at the tower? But Aderyn had told her, all those years ago, that Evandar must have found the black stone elsewhere and merely placed it in the ruin. She left the house on the chance that walking along the cliffs might clear her mind and allow her to delve further into what the dream-cliffs had signified.

To her surprise, she found Prince Daralanteriel there ahead of her. He was standing and looking out to sea with his arms folded across his chest. As she walked up to him, her footsteps crunched on the sand among the beach grasses, and he turned to greet her with a wave of one hand.

‘Dar?’ Valandario said. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, not really,’ Dar said. ‘Just thinking about the road ahead.’

‘Will we be going to the trading grounds?’

‘No, we’ll be travelling north along the Cantariel. There’s a Roundear lord – Samyc’s his name – who’s my vassal now. We should make sure that he’s safe. I’m thinking of asking for volunteer archers to spend the summer in his dun, just in case Horsekin raiders come his way.’

‘Do you think the Horsekin will dare?’

‘No, but I’d rather not be proved wrong. And then we need to cut east to visit Tieryn Cadryc.’

‘That’s a long ride away.’

‘Yes, it certainly is.’ Dar got a harried look about the eyes. ‘I’m thinking that I need to build a winter residence up north. Not exactly a palace, though I suppose it amounts to one. The gods only know where I’ll get the stone to build it or the craftsmen, either. And then there’s Lord Gerran. I owe him a new dun as well.’ Dar paused to look miserably away. ‘I never wanted to be tied down to a town. Everything’s changing, Val. I don’t know what to do!’

‘That’s why you have us. Wise Ones, I mean. When Gavantar comes back from the Southern Isles he’ll bring new settlers with him, and they know all about building towns. Look at Mandra.’

‘Just so.’ He smiled, sunny again. ‘We’ll have one last summer of freedom, anyway.’

Is that what this is? Val thought. Our last summer as wandering Westfolk? Their lives would pass into legend, she supposed, a time wrapped in wistful mist that hid the mud and chill of winter, the black flies of summer, the constant search for wood or the collecting of dried dung from their horses and sheep for meagre fires, the endless striking of tents only to raise them again. She turned and looked out over the farmland around Mandra. In some of the fields the winter wheat stood a couple of feet high, bowing and rising like ocean waves under the south wind. No one would have to trade with Deverry men for the bread and porridge it represented.

‘To be honest, Dar,’ Valandario said. ‘I for one won’t miss the wandering.’

‘Carra said the same thing. So have a lot of the other women.’

‘But the men agree with you? Will they miss it?’

‘Mostly, yes. Well, maybe in the summers, those who love to wander can take the herds out, while the rest stay behind in wherever it is, town, farms, whatever we eventually have.’ He shook himself like a wet dog, then repeated himself. ‘We’ll have our last summer of freedom, anyway.’

‘So we will. Are we leaving today?’

‘On the morrow. It’s time for the Day of Remembrance, and I thought we should hold it here with the townsfolk.’

‘Yes, that’s an excellent idea. The more you can do to remind the townsfolk you’re their prince, the better.’

‘So Devaberiel said, too. He’s composing a special poem for the occasion. I’m not sure where to hold the gathering, though. There isn’t any town square or the like.’

‘I know!’ Val smiled at her own idea. ‘About a mile to the west there’s a ruined tower. Some Deverry lord built a dun out here, back when Calonderiel was a young man, I think it was. I wasn’t born yet, of course. Anyway, the People drove him out again. The ruin would be an interesting reminder in itself.’

‘Splendid! We’ll do that. I’ll just go tell the mayor.’

Some hours before sunset, the townsfolk and the alar, minus a few herdsmen who’d volunteered to watch over the herds and flocks, gathered at the ruined dun. Over the past few years, the People in Mandra had pulled down much of the outer wall to use the stone for their town, but the tower still stood inside the fragment of arc left. Brambles, ivy, weeds grew thick inside what had once been the ward. The wooden doors and outbuildings had long since rotted away, as had the floors inside the broch tower itself, or so Calonderiel told her.

‘We had a couple of stiff fights at this dun,’ the banadar said. ‘The first one was when we cleaned out the rats that had infested it.’

‘I take it you mean the Deverry lord and his men,’ Val said.

‘Just that.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘And then – not long ago, really, maybe ninety summers ago or suchlike – another Deverry lord had the gall to try to kill Aderyn here. That was because of –’ He stopped in mid-sentence.

‘Loddlaen. I know. I heard the tale from Aderyn.’

‘Um, well, my apologies anyway. Here, I’d better go help the mayor.’

Wrapped in embarrassment like a cloak, Calonderiel hurried off. Valandario watched him go and thought about Aderyn, dead for so many years now. He’d had the courage to kill his own son, something that made her shake her head in wonder. And now that son was about to be reborn – no! she told herself. Not Loddlaen. Someone new, and a girl child at that!

A few big blocks of stone stood at one edge of the remains of wall. Devaberiel climbed onto the highest of them. When he raised his arms into the air, the murmuring crown quieted. Mothers collared children and made them sit down in a little chorus of ‘hush, now, hush’. Devaberiel called out with the ancient words of the ritual.

‘We are here to remember.’

‘To remember,’ the crowd chanted, ‘to remember the West.’

‘We are here to remember the cities,’ Devaberiel continued, ‘Rinbaladelan of the Fair Towers, Tanbalapalim of the Wide River, Bravelmelim of the Rainbow Bridges, yea! all of the cities, and the towns, and the marvels of the Far West.’ He paused, smiling at the assembly in front of him. ‘But while we mourn what we have lost, let us remember new marvels. Mandra rises amid fertile fields. Ranadar’s heir lives and walks among us.’

The listeners cheered, a sound like the roar of a high sea breaking on the gravelled beach. Some clapped, some stood, all called out. When Devaberiel raised his arms again, the crowd quieted, but slowly.

‘The cities of the Far West lie in ruins,’ the bard went on, ‘but Mandra grows and prospers. I see what comes to us on the wings of destiny. Some day the West will be ours again.’

More cheers, more clapping, and despite all her careful self-control, despite her dweomer and her power, Valandario realized that she hovered on the edge of tears.

Since Devaberiel was the only bard in attendance, the ceremony that day was a short one. He retold the ancient tale of the Hordes, riding out of the north to destroy the elven civilization of the mountains, but he’d shortened the story, Val noticed. All of the adults among the listeners sat politely, attentively, making the ancient responses when the ritual demanded, yet it seemed to her that few truly mourned. The children fussed and fidgeted, un-entranced by the telling.

Once Devaberiel had finished, however, and the music and the feasting got underway, everyone grew lively again. Valandario walked through the celebration, nodding and smiling, since it was impossible to hear what anyone said or for them to have heard her answer had she given one. At last she found Daralanteriel, standing in the midst of admirers. When he waved her over, the townsfolk all stepped back to allow the Wise One access to the Prince.

‘It went very well, I thought,’ Val said.

‘So did I,’ Dar said. ‘Dev is a marvel in his own way.’

‘Just so. Is Dalla still here?’

‘No, Cal insisted on taking her back to the tents to rest. You look like you’re ready to leave, too.’

‘I am. I need to pack if we’re leaving on the morrow.’

‘And we are – early.’ Dar sighed and looked away, perhaps considering that last summer of freedom. ‘It’s time we got on the road.’

Rather than risk them on the road, Valandario left the books in the care of Lara and Jin. The only exception was the book that had belonged to Laz, which Sidro wanted back. She packed up her personal possessions, putting them and the scrying cloths and gems into tent bags and leather sacks. Some of the alar’s young men were waiting to carry them over to the camp for her. They all trooped upstairs to collect them, while Lara and Val stood to one side to watch.

‘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.

Together Val and Dallandra trod down a rough circle in the grass. After the proper invocations Val evened up its perimeter into a proper circle by marking the damp sod with the point of the sword. As the sun rose, she greeted the powers who stand behind this visible symbol of warmth and light. To them she consecrated the ceremony.

‘Are you ready, sentinel?’ Val said.

‘I am.’ Dallandra raised her own sword. ‘Let the ritual begin.’ She brought the sword down sharply.

Valandario stood in the centre of the circle, lifted her arms over her head, and vibrated the words from the scroll, drawing breath from deep within herself, breaking each word into syllables as Aderyn had taught her, all those years before.

‘Ol-duh um-duh non-ci do a doh-oh-ah-een day Iah-ee-da, O gah day poh-ah-mal ca a no-tay-hay-oh-a ah av-ah-bay-hay. Ha-na-ma-rah ha-na-ma-rah! Ah-ca-ray, ca, od zah-meh-rah-nah, la-pay ol zee-air-do noo-coh ol-pay-ee-air-tay de ol-pay-ee-air-tay.’

For a moment nothing whatever happened. Valandario took another deep breath – and flew, or so it seemed to her, darted up through the air and the brightening sunlight, up ever upward, until she stood on an island, a perfect circle in the midst of hyacinth-coloured seas. All around it purple waves rose stiffly, then subsided without a trace of foam. A greenish sunlight shimmered on the sea and glinted from the island’s glass-smooth surface. In the island’s centre a circular dimple formed. Out of it rose a silver pillar, a mere stump at first, then growing higher and higher, until at last Val stood before a translucent tower.

‘Ah-ca-ray, oh servant of the Light!’ Valandario said.

Within the pillar a point of violet light bloomed, grew larger, stretched into a vertical line. The line thickened, swirled, and formed at last into the tenuous shape of a woman.

‘Why do you call upon me?’ the spirit said. ‘What do you wish to know?’

‘I wish to know about Haen Marn, the island in the planes of form that’s a shadow of this island.’

‘Not of this island, but of another. I know not where that lies.’

‘If you do not know, how may I find out?’

‘I know not that, either. You must ask the Lady of the Black Stone Isle, she who dwells on the plane of matter and death.’

‘How may I find her?’

‘Go to the island.’ A trace of annoyance crept into the spirit’s voice. ‘Even a fleshly creature such as you should know this. Go to the island and ask her.’

‘The island has fled. I don’t know where it lies.’

‘Then summon it.’

‘I don’t know how to summon it.’

‘The island has its own summons. You need not ask me. Mospleh, mospleh, mospleh.’

‘I don’t know what mospleh means.’

Inside her pillar, the spirit frowned. ‘Look to the metal of the moon and to the moon herself at her first waxing.’

‘What –’

But the spirit was growing thin, fading, turning back into a strand of violet light, gleaming against silver. The pillar swirled once, then sank slowly back into the island. Valandario felt herself take flight, swooped down, circled round, saw below her the ritual sword, gleaming in the rising sun. She let herself drop, then settled feet first onto the hard metal.

The vision disappeared. She was back, slipping a little on the wet grass as she stepped off the sword blade. She stamped thrice on the ground, then picked up the sword and cut through the circle.

‘May any Wildfolk bound by this ceremony go free! It is over!’ Val called out and stamped again for good measure. With a sigh she wiped the mud on the point of her sword off on the side of her boots.

‘I gather the evocation called something forth,’ Dallandra said. ‘I could hear your questions. Did the spirit ever answer?’

‘Oh yes, but we’re not much farther along than we were before. You know, there are times when I get really tired of spirits and their blasted riddles.’

‘So do I,’ Dallandra paused and glanced back to the spot where the camp had stood. ‘It looks like the alar’s ready to ride out. Tell me what you saw while we walk back, will you? I can’t bear to wait till we make camp again.’

Branna had seen Valandario and Dallandra leave camp for a dweomer working. During that day’s ride she burned with curiosity, but she knew that she had no right to pry. She could only hope that Dallandra would choose to tell her at the evening meal.

As dweomer apprentices, Branna and Neb generally ate with their masters rather than cooking for themselves. The various members of the royal alar took turns feeding the Wise Ones – a good thing, since Branna had never cooked a meal in her life. Calonderiel usually joined them as well. While Branna was expecting Neb as usual that evening, he never arrived.

‘I don’t know where he went,’ she told Dallandra. ‘Do you?’

‘I don’t.’ Dallandra glanced at Calonderiel. ‘Have you seen him?’

His mouth full of herbed greens, Cal nodded and hastily swallowed. ‘I did,’ the banadar said. ‘He told me he was fasting, but he didn’t say why. I assumed you’d set him some practice.’

‘Naught of the sort!’ Dallandra briefly looked sour. ‘Mayhap he doesn’t feel well or suchlike.’

‘Starve a cold, feed a fever,’ Cal said. ‘Or is it the other way round?’

Dallandra mugged disgust, then handed him a piece of soda bread, which he took with a grin.

For the rest of the meal, Dallandra said little. Branna went back to her own tent with her curiosity still burning. Neb returned much later in the evening. Under a pale dweomer light Branna was laying out their blankets when he strode into the tent.

‘You’ve been talking to Dallandra about me, haven’t you?’ Neb said.

‘I haven’t.’ Branna looked up in some surprise. ‘What –’

‘Well, someone told her I was fasting.’

‘It was Calonderiel, not me. It happened at dinner tonight.’

‘Oh.’

‘Did she tell you not to?’

‘She did. I was only trying to sharpen my second sight, but she told me it was dangerous at my stage of development.’

Branna made a noncommittal noise.

‘And another thing.’ Neb folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at her. ‘If it wasn’t you, why did she bring up Nevyn, then?’

‘When?’ Branna rose to face him.

‘Yesterday afternoon. And then tonight she mentioned somewhat again. It must have come from you.’

‘I don’t even know what she said to you.’

‘Yesterday she mentioned Rhegor.’

‘I – who?’

Neb’s expression suddenly changed to something slack and exhausted. The silver light directly above him filled the hollows of his face with dark shadows. He turned away and shoved his hands in the pockets of his brigga. ‘I don’t suppose you would remember him,’ Neb said. ‘My apologies.’

‘Neb, I don’t understand what you’re going on about.’

He gave her one brief look, then turned and ducked out of the tent. It was some while before he returned, and by then Branna had given up waiting for him and gone to bed. For a few moments he stumbled around in the dark tent.

‘You could make a light,’ she said. ‘Or I could.’

He spoke not a word, merely sat down on the edge of their blankets and began to pull off his boots. The smell of mead hung around him. If he’d been drinking with the other men, she knew, conversation would prove frustrating and little more. Branna turned over and pretended to sleep. Eventually he managed to undress and slip into the blankets beside her, only to fall asleep with a loud snore.

Branna lay awake, wondering if she was sorry she’d married him. She found herself missing Aunt Galla and Cousin Adranna with a real longing to see them again, to sit down and ask them what they would have done, married to a man like Neb. I can never tell them, she reminded herself, not without mentioning dweomer.

With the morning Neb became perfectly pleasant again, charming, even. When he went out to help with the horses, he was whistling. Still, the farther north that the alar travelled, the more thoughts of her kinsfolk came to Branna’s mind. When by Prince Dar’s reckoning they reached the border of Pyrdon, she found herself wondering how the winter had treated them.

‘I’ve been doing those exercises on farseeing that you gave me,’ Branna told Grallezar. ‘Do you think I could practice by trying to see the Red Wolf dun? I do worry about my aunt, up there in the snow for months, and the army took so much food away, too.’

‘That would be a good practice, I do think,’ Grallezar said. ‘You be very familiar with the place, and your worry does lend strength to the seeing. But spend only a short while at each attempt, and bring yourself back to the earth plane when you be finished.’ Grallezar glanced around the tent. ‘In that wood box there on the floor, below the red bag, there be a time glass. Take it. You may practice for as long as it takes the sand to run half out of the upper glass.’

Branna found the box and opened it, then took the glass out with great care. She’d never seen anything as fine as the pale green glass cones in their polished wood stand, about six inches high overall. She turned it over and watched the sand drip from one cone to the other at a slow, steady pace. Her gnome stared at it open-mouthed.

‘Take the box, too,’ Grallezar said, ‘to keep it safe, like.’

‘I will, then, and my thanks!’

During her first few practices, Branna saw nothing but her memories of the Red Wolf dun. Yet finally, early one morning when Neb was off studying with Dallandra, she received a very brief, very misty impression of the great hall. Aunt Galla was just coming down the stairs, and she looked well and happy, if somewhat thinner. Branna’s pleasure at seeing this vision broke it. It was another four practices before at last she saw the dun again and the fields roundabout, all muddy from spring rain. From then on, Branna managed to catch regular glimpses of the dun, although she couldn’t control which part of it she was seeing.

‘Everyone looks well,’ she told Grallezar. ‘It gladdens my heart to see them. I wonder, though, about Solla. I told you about her, didn’t I? Gerran’s wife? I have this feeling that she’s with child, but I can’t really be sure. It’s too bad you can’t smell things when you scry.’

Grallezar laughed aloud at that. ‘From what the prince do say,’ Grallezar said, ‘we should be there in some while. And then we’ll know if she be so or not.’

Up north in the Red Wolf dun, its women had been worrying about Branna as much as she’d been worrying about them. Not an evening meal went by, Gerran noticed, without the dun’s lady, Galla, or the widowed Lady Adranna mentioning her.

‘Out there with the Westfolk!’ Galla would say. ‘I just can’t believe it sometimes, that a niece of mine would be off with the Westfolk!’

‘Well, Mama,’ Adranna generally answered, ‘I can believe it of Branna. She always had a wild streak, and look at the way she spoke to that dragon, as bold as brass!’

Gerran would glance his wife’s way and see her trying not to smile. Only he and Solla knew exactly how deep Branna’s wildness ran.

As the days slipped by, each a little longer than the last, the spring air became warm enough for the womenfolk to carry their sewing outside to take the sun. Servants put chairs out in the dun’s kitchen garden and carried the ladies’ sewing. Gerran escorted them and saw his wife settled in a chair near the dun’s lady. The sunlight caught auburn highlights in Solla’s brown hair, and her hazel eyes had turned a beautiful green.

‘Shall I bring you a cushion?’ Gerran said. ‘Or a footstool?’

‘I’m fine like this, my love,’ Solla said.

‘Are you sure? Do you need a shawl?’

‘Gerro!’ Lady Galla leaned forward in her chair and laughed. ‘She’s with child, not ill!’

‘Lady Galla’s right.’ Solla laid a soft hand on his arm. ‘We northern lasses are a tough lot.’

Gerran smiled; she’d been repeating that sentiment often in the last few months. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I’ll send one of the pages out to sit here with you. If you need somewhat, he’ll fetch it.’

‘Penna’s right here.’ Solla sounded puzzled.

Gerran had simply not noticed her young maid, who sat on the ground right beside her mistress’s chair. Penna looked up at him with wide dark eyes that revealed no trace of any emotion under their plumed brown brows. She was a peculiar lass in his opinion, a skinny little thing with slick brown hair that she wore as short as a lad’s. Solla had given her a place in the dun, but the lady took as much care of the maid as the maid did of the lady.

‘It’s the pages’ duty to run messages,’ Gerran said. ‘Penna’s duty is to sew.’

‘Whatever you say, my love.’ Solla rolled her eyes heavenward at this precision.

Penna managed a brief smile.

Gerran went off to hunt for pages. Eventually he found Ynedd, the youngest of the three, leaning against the wall of the stable. His hands were in his pockets, and he seemed to be studying the ground between his feet. Dirt and bits of straw clung to his blond hair, cropped off but curly.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gerran said. ‘Have Clae and Coryn been tormenting you again?’

Ynedd looked up with red-rimmed eyes. A fresh purple bruise mottled his cheek.

‘I see,’ Gerran said. ‘They won’t stop until you fight back.’

‘I tried to, my lord,’ Ynedd said, ‘but there’s two of them.’

‘What? They both jumped you at once, did they?’

Ynedd mumbled something so softly that Gerran could barely hear him. He took it to mean ‘I’m not supposed to tell.’

‘Where are they, do you know?’

‘I don’t, my lord.’

‘Well, I’ll find them sooner or later, and I’ll have a bit of a chat with them. Two against one? Not among the lads I’m training!’

Ynedd managed to smile at that, a little smirk of anticipated revenge. ‘Are you going to beat them?’

‘I’m not. The grooms need help mucking out the stables, and Clae and Coryn can provide it. As for you, go join the women out in the garden. My lady might need to send me a message.’

‘Well and good, my lord.’ Ynedd grinned at him. ‘My thanks.’

The boy peeled himself from the wall and hurried off, so pleased with the order that Gerran followed for some yards, then stood watching as the womenfolk exclaimed over Ynedd’s bruise and sat him down among them. Lady Galla even gave him some sort of sweetmeat. What’s next? Gerran thought sourly. Will they be teaching him how to sew? Since he couldn’t argue with her ladyship, he turned back and went inside the broch to the great hall.

The warband had gathered around one table and was wagering furiously on a game of carnoic between Daumyr, one of the tieryn’s riders, and Salamander, the gerthddyn who’d spent the winter at the tieryn’s table. Gerran dipped himself a tankard of ale from an open barrel near the honour hearth and wandered over to watch. He was planning on sitting in his usual chair at the head of the table nearest the servants’ hearth, but he found it already occupied by Lord Mirryn.

‘And what are you doing here?’ Gerran said.

‘I could ask the same of you, my lord.’ Mirryn paused for a grin in his general direction. ‘You’ve got a higher rank than me now, married as you are, and here your wife’s with child already. I figure that from now on, I’m the captain of my father’s warband and little more.’

‘If Solla has a son, I’ll gloat then and not before.’ Gerran felt his usual pang of cold fear at the mention of Solla’s pregnancy. What if she dies? He shoved the thought away with a toss of his head. ‘But anyway, it doesn’t matter if you or I or the Lord of Hell call you the captain. What counts is what your father thinks of the matter.’

Not long after they learned exactly that, when Cadryc strode into the great hall. He pulled off his yellow and red plaid cloak, tossed it over the back of his chair at the head of the honour table, then stood looking around him with a puzzled frown. When he spotted Mirryn he walked across to join them. Mirryn got up and turned to face his father. The men gathered around the carnoic game fell silent; those who’d been standing hurriedly knelt. Cadryc waved his hand in their direction to allow them to stand up again, then turned his attention to his son.

‘Well, Mirro,’ Cadryc said, ‘what are you doing over here?’

‘The Falcon’s going to have a dun of his own soon enough,’ Mirryn said. ‘So I’m the captain of your warband now.’

‘Ah.’ Cadryc paused for a long moment. ‘So you are. Carry on with your game, men.’ He turned and walked away, leaving Mirryn open-mouthed but speechless behind him.

The men of the warband looked as stunned as their new captain. They said nothing, but they kept glancing at one another. And what will they think of him? Gerran wondered. He’s never ridden to war. Their carefully arranged faces revealed nothing. Mirryn sat down to a profound silence.

‘That was easy enough,’ Gerran said.

Mirryn nodded and picked up his tankard from the table. The conversation and the wagering resumed, slowly at first, then erupted into cheers from Daumyr’s supporters when his next move won the game.

‘Ai!’ Salamander said. ‘I am vanquished, well and truly conquered, routed, and driven from the field!’

‘I take it that means you don’t want another game,’ Daumyr said.

‘Quite right. You’ve beaten me thrice, and my vanity won’t take another blow.’ Salamander got up with a grin. ‘I think I’ll drown my sorrows in some of our lord’s ale.’

Daumyr turned on the bench and made a sketchy bob that might have signified a bow to the two lords.

‘Here, captain,’ Daumyr said to Mirryn, ‘care to give me a game, my lord?’

‘I do indeed,’ Mirryn said. ‘Bring the board up here, will you?’

Good man, Daumyr! Gerran thought. He decided that he didn’t dare risk acting as if he thought Mirryn needed his backing on his new authority. He went to the honour table and sat down at Cadryc’s left. The tieryn was obviously trying to suppress a grin at the effect he’d just had on his son. Gerran waited until a servant lass had brought Cadryc ale and left again. Carrying his own tankard, Salamander joined them.

‘I don’t know if you want my opinion, your grace,’ Gerran said, ‘but you made the right choice for your new captain.’

‘Good. It gladdens my heart that you agree.’ Cadryc frowned into his tankard. ‘No doubt the lad will have plenty of chances to prove himself, with the cursed Horsekin prowling around.’ He reached into the tankard and pulled out a bit of straw, which he tossed onto the floor before continuing. ‘I just hope it’s not too soon.’

The tieryn and the gerthddyn exchanged a significant glance.

‘Um, well, your grace,’ Gerran said, puzzled, ‘the sooner he gets a chance to draw his first blood, the better.’

‘I know that. Wasn’t what I meant.’ Cadryc glared at his ale again, as if suspecting it of harbouring dark secrets.

‘If there’s more straw in that, we should send one of the lasses to tell Cook.’

‘Um? Oh, true spoken, but it should be all right.’ Cadryc took a long swallow. ‘Naught wrong with it now.’

‘If you don’t mind me shoving an oar in,’ Salamander said, ‘Mirryn needs to marry, and soon.’

‘True spoken,’ Cadryc said. ‘And I hope to the gods he sires more sons that I did!’

‘Does Lady Galla have a match in mind?’ Salamander asked.

‘She’s doing her best to find one. That’s the trouble with being out here on the wretched border, with the noble-born so thin on the ground. I don’t particularly want him marrying a common-born lass, but who else is there, eh?’

‘Admittedly the choice is limited.’ Salamander glanced at Gerran, as if inviting him to comment.

Gerran shrugged. He had no ideas on the subject.

‘Might as well leave all that to the womenfolk,’ the tieryn said. ‘Now, Gerro, I’ve been meaning to talk with you about the Falcon clan’s new dun. Cursed if I know who’s going to pay for it. You can’t just throw a few stones together like a farmer, eh? You’ll need a proper master mason from Trev Hael to plan the thing.’

‘Well,’ Gerran said, ‘my wife tells me that her brother owes her a fair amount of hard coin – an inheritance from an uncle, I think she said – but I’d hate to use that.’

‘You may have to. We don’t live in the best of times, lad.’ Cadryc paused for a long swallow of his ale. ‘We’ve got to get men and defences out into the Melyn Valley as soon as we can. I doubt me if the Horsekin will have the stomach for raiding this summer, but sooner or later, they’ll come back. I’ve been thinking about our new overlord. The coin should come from him.’

‘Do you think he has it?’

It was Cadryc’s turn for the shrug. Salamander heaved a mournful sigh.

‘Do we even know where he is?’ Gerran went on. ‘I swore to Prince Dar gladly, but ye gods, the Westfolk could be anywhere out in the grasslands. All I’ve ever heard is that they ride north every summer.’

‘That will have to do, then, eh? Sooner or later he’s bound to ask us for dues and taxes, and we’ll find out then.’

Gerran looked at Salamander and raised an eyebrow, but the gerthddyn merely buried his nose in his tankard. Since they couldn’t speak openly of dweomer in front of the tieryn, Gerran let the matter drop.

Cadryc and Gerran weren’t the only men wondering where Prince Daralanteriel of the Westlands might be. A few days later messengers turned up at Cadryc’s gates, two road-dusty men riding matched greys and leading two more mounts behind them. The extra horses identified them as speeded couriers, and their tabards sported the royal gold wyvern of Dun Deverry.

One-armed Tarro, who’d been watching the gates that afternoon, showed them directly into the great hall. When Gerran realized who they were, he sent a page off to find his wife, one of the only two people in the dun who could read. The messengers knelt at Tieryn Cadryc’s side. One of them proffered a silver tube, sealed at both ends with gold-coloured wax.

‘From Prince Voran of Dun Deverry, your grace,’ he said. ‘Humbly requesting a favour should your grace be willing.’

‘Very well.’ Cadryc took the message tube from him. ‘Go sit with my men. A lass will bring you ale, and tell her if you’d like a meal to go with it.’

‘Our humble thanks, your grace.’

Both men rose and strode away to the far side of the hall. Cadryc scowled at the messages in his hand.

‘You know, Gerro,’ he said, ‘there was somewhat about the way that fellow spoke to me, so carefully, like, that troubled my heart. I was cursed glad to get out from under Gwerbret Ridvar’s overlordship last autumn. It was leave or rebel, truly. I know you agreed. It was good of Prince Dar to take us on. But –’ He hesitated, groping for words. ‘Ah, by the black hairy arse of the Lord of Hell! I don’t know what I mean.’

‘I think I do,’ Gerran said. ‘We live outside of Deverry now, don’t we? We’re not vassals of the high king and the princes any more, so Voran has to ask, not demand. We might as well be Westfolk ourselves.’

‘That’s it!’ Cadryc grinned, then let the grin fade. ‘I knew that, of course, when we swore to Dar. But somehow I hadn’t quite grasped it. I have now.’

‘I still wonder what got the gwerbret to let us go. You’d think the royal line would want as many vassals as it can hold.’

‘Ah, that’s the issue, lad! As they can hold, but they can’t hold a blasted one of us if we can’t hold our land for them. The Melyn Valley’s too far west. I’ll wager the high king knows it’d just be a wound on the kingdom, bleeding coin and men.’

‘So he’ll let Prince Dar do the bleeding instead.’

‘Just that.’ Cadryc saluted him with his tankard. ‘But with all those archers he has, the wound won’t be a big one.’

When Solla arrived at the table of honour, Cadryc broke the seals on the tube and pulled out the letter inside, then handed it to her. She sat down in the chair to his right and unrolled the parchment to look it over.

‘Just read it out,’ Cadryc snapped, then ducked his head in apology. ‘Well, if you would, my lady.’

‘Of course.’ Solla began: ‘To his grace, Tieryn Cadryc of the Westlands, and his lords of the Melyn Valley, I, Prince Voran of Dun Deverry, send greetings. I have news of some import for your overlord, Prince Daralanteriel of the Westlands. Alas, I know not where he might be or where I might meet with him. If your grace should know, would he be so kind as to send me an answer by the messengers who have brought him this letter? I am currently residing at Gwingedd in Cerrgonney, but I plan to continue on to Arcodd as the spring progresses. I will be residing there for some while, as I have every intention of demanding some legal redress against Govvin, priest of Bel, for the insults he tendered me during last summer’s campaigns. If his highness Daralanteriel could join me there, I should be most gratified.’ Solla glanced up. ‘The rest is all a formal farewell. He never says what this thing of great import is.’

‘Blast him!’ Cadryc muttered. ‘No doubt we won’t be able to pry anything out of those messengers, either.’

‘They may not know,’ Gerran said. ‘I doubt if it’s his action against Govvin. He wouldn’t need to consult Prince Dar about that.’

‘Huh!’ Cadryc said with a snort. ‘I wonder what the high priest down in Dun Deverry will think?’

‘Knowing the prince, your grace,’ Solla said, ‘I’d wager that he’s already brought the high priest round to his side.’

‘Most like. Well, I don’t know where our Prince Dar is, and I don’t know how in the hells we’re going to find him, either.’

Gerran glanced around and saw Salamander, lurking behind a nearby pillar, convenient for eavesdropping.

‘Leave it to me.’ Gerran got up from his chair. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

When Salamander saw Gerran walking his way, he headed for the back door of the great hall. He knew that Gerran would follow him down to the dun wall, where they could have a little privacy away from the clutter of the ward. It was odd, he reflected, that Gerran would have so few qualms about calling upon dweomer, when most Deverry lords refused to admit that such a thing could even exist. Odd or not, he was glad to dispense with the usual verbal fencing and insinuations.

‘I take it you want me to find out where Daralanteriel is,’ Salamander said.

‘Just that,’ Gerran said. ‘Can you?’

‘Easily.’

Salamander glanced up at the sky, where towards the west a few clouds drifted against the crystalline blue, and let his Sight shift to thoughts of Dar and the royal alar. He saw them immediately, a long line of riders followed by herds of horses, flocks of sheep, horses laden with packs and more dragging travois, dogs, children on ponies – all the usual straggling untidiness of Westfolk on the move. All around them stretched grassland.

‘Somewhere west of Eldidd,’ Salamander said. ‘I can’t tell exactly where, I’m afraid, because they’re out in open country.’

‘Is there anything but open country west of Eldidd?’ Gerran said.

‘There’s not, and that, indeed, is the problem. Here, give me a while, and I may be able to tell you more.’

‘Well and good, then, and my thanks.’

They walked back inside together, but Salamander left the lord at the table of honour and hurried upstairs to his wedge-shaped chamber high up in the broch. He barred the door, then sat down on the wide stone sill of the window. The sharp west wind drifted in, bringing with it the stink of the stables below. Salamander rummaged under his shirt, brought out a pomander, made of an apple dried with Bardek spices, and inhaled the scent.

From his perch he could see over the stables and the dun wall both to the meadows beyond, pale green with the first grass. The clouds had drifted a little further towards zenith and grown larger as well. He focused on the white billows and thought of Dallandra. He saw the royal alar again, stopped in a swirl of riders and animals. Some of the men had dismounted and were strolling towards the various travois. Apparently they were going to set up the tents. In the vision Salamander realized that the western sky had already clouded over. Some distance from the alar ran a river. It looked to him like the Cantariel, but since it wound through flat meadowland like so many rivers did out in the grasslands, he couldn’t be sure. Dallandra was standing at the riverbank and watching muddy water flow. He sent his mind out toward hers.

It took her some moments to respond. He could pick up her emotional state, a blend of annoyance and physical discomfort. Finally she acknowledged him with a wordless sense of welcome and a wave of one hand.

‘Are you ill?’ Salamander thought to her. ‘Have you been hurt?’

He focused in on the image of her face. She looked pale, and dark smudges marred the skin under her eyes. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m merely pregnant, and I spent the day on horseback. It’s not a happy combination.’

‘I can easily contact you later –’

‘No, no, I’ve been meaning to speak with you. I need to ask you something. It’s about Nevyn. You knew him well, didn’t you?’

‘I certainly did, oft times to my severe distress and humiliation. The old man had the horrid habit of always being right, especially when it came to my faults, flaws, mistakes, and general ill-doings.’

He could feel Dallandra’s amusement as clearly as he would have heard her laughter had they been together. ‘Was he stubborn?’ she said.

‘Very. Like the proverbial bull in a warm stable. Getting him outside on a winter’s day was a most formidable task. Is Neb giving you trouble?’

‘Aha, you guessed! I’m worried, really. He seems to want to shed his current personality and just turn back into Nevyn. Yet when I try to speak with him about it, I can feel his mind close up.’

‘This sounds dangerous.’

‘It is. Once the child’s born, my attention’s bound to be divided. I should have apprenticed him to Grallezar, I suppose, and taken Branna on myself, but at the time it seemed a better match this way.’

‘I thought you made the right decision then, and I still do.’

‘Thank you. At times I have trouble remembering why I made it.’ She paused, and he received the general impression of a jumble of thoughts. ‘It was because of the healing lore, I think. He seemed to want to learn that as well, and Grallezar has none.’

‘Is there anything I can do to help? I can easily take him through some of the work.’

‘If he’ll listen to you, and he’d blasted well better!’ Her image smiled in relief. ‘If nothing else, you can keep an eye on him for me.’

‘Gladly, and if he won’t listen to me, I’ll smack him a good one.’ He flexed one arm. ‘We mountebanks and jugglers have strong muscles, you know.’

Dallandra laughed, and the sense of relief strengthened.

‘I may hold you to that,’ she said. ‘But how are you? You sound well.’

‘I am indeed, having survived another miserable winter. I was wondering, oh princess of powers perilous, where you and the royal alar might be.’

‘Still in the Westlands, but ultimately we’re heading for the Red Wolf dun.’

‘Splendid! I’ve got news for our prince. There’s a message waiting for him here from Prince Voran. His royal self sounded more than a little put out that he didn’t know where to send the message, too. He wants Dar to meet him in Cengarn to discuss some mysterious matter.’

‘How odd! I’ll tell Dar, certainly, but we’re going to stop along the way. He wants to visit Lord Samyc, since he’s Samyc’s overlord now.’

‘Ah, I see. However, if he could send Cadryc a letter, announcing his most regal plans, it would set at rest both Cadryc’s mind and that of Prince Voran.’

‘I’ll have him do that. Neb can write it, and it’ll do him good to earn his keep.’

Salamander laughed under his breath. ‘How far away are you?’

‘A good long way. We’re travelling up the Cantariel.’ Dalla paused briefly, calculating. ‘We’re maybe a couple of hundred miles from the coast. Well, maybe a little more, closer to two hundred and a half, say. I can’t be any more sure than that.’

‘Of course. In vision it looks like you’re west of Eldidd.’

‘We are. The travelling seems to drag on and on, somehow, but perhaps I’m just tired. It’s a good thing we started as early in the year as we did, or we wouldn’t reach you till high summer. As it is, we should get there some while before. Curse it all, at moments I wish Meranaldar were still riding with us! He could be a bore, but he knew how to mark out time.’

‘Eventually we all will, oh mistress of mighty magicks, whether we want to or not. Such things always seem to matter in towns, and towns, alas, lie in our destiny. If naught else, having a royal dun would let his peers know where to send Dar letters.’

While the absent Meranaldar might have known how to mark out time, someone arrived at the Westfolk camp not long after who understood space and distances. Just as the alar was pitching the tents for a night’s rest, the silver wyrm flew in, circling high over the camp, then landing a good half a mile off to avoid panicking the horses. Dalla took her sack of medicinals and hurried out to meet him.

The dragon lay down to allow Dallandra to examine his wound, a thin pink stripe on his silvery-blue side. When she’d first been treating it, she’d cut a piece of leather, boiled it with wax to keep it from stretching, and marked the length of the cut upon it. When she measured the cut against the marked strip, she found the wound the same length as before. Although it looked pink and clean, it still opened into flesh, not scar tissue.

‘Rori, you’ve been licking it!’ Dallandra said.

‘I have not!’

‘Then why hasn’t it healed up?’

‘Arzosah tells me that dragons heal as slowly as they grow, but truly, she’s as puzzled as you are.’

‘Especially slowly, I imagine, when the dragon’s not done what the healer asked of him.’

‘I swear it, Dalla, I’ve not licked it or scratched it or rubbed it against anything. Well, once by accident I did rub it against a rock, but it hurt so much I made sure I’d never do it again.’

Dallandra set her hands on her hips and glared at him. He raised his head and glared right back.

‘At least it’s not bleeding,’ Dallandra said. ‘Does it ever?’

‘No,’ Rori said. ‘But it’s driving me daft, itching itching itching! Ye gods, sometimes I’m tempted to lick it, I have to admit. It’s worse to itch than to ache, I swear it.’

‘I can wash it with willow water for a little relief now that you’re here. It might sting at first.’

‘Stinging’s better than itching.’

Rori sat up while Dallandra got together a leather glove, a little heap of dry horse dung, a kettle of water, and the strips of dried willow bark. She lit the dung for a fire, brought the water to a simmer, tossed in a good handful of bark, then took the kettle off the fire and allowed the mixture to steep. While they were waiting, Valandario came walking out from camp to join them. She was carrying something clasped in her right hand.

‘I was wondering if you could answer me a few questions,’ Val said to the dragon, ‘about this.’ She opened her hand to reveal a chunk of lapis lazuli the size of a crabapple, carved into an egg-shape. A fine gold chain ran through a hole drilled into the smaller end. ‘Dalla told me it belongs to you.’

‘So it does,’ Rori said. ‘Or it did, once. I wondered what had happened to it.’

‘I found it on the ground with your clothes,’ Dallandra said, ‘after the transformation.’

‘Ah, I see.’ He sighed in a long hiss. ‘It’s of little use to me now. Val, it’s yours if you want it.’

‘That’s very generous,’ Valandario said, ‘but I assure you that I wasn’t trying to get it away from you. I was just wondering what it is. It’s got dweomer upon it, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. An old dwarven woman gave it to me – Otho’s mother, in fact.’ He turned his massive head Dallandra’s way. ‘Otho the dwarf, the silver dagger’s smith – I doubt me if you knew him. He’s the one who got me to Haen Marn, in fact, for all the good it did the poor old bastard. I never met a man more sour than Otho, and I hope to all the gods that I never do, either. Be that as it may,’ he turned back to Valandario, ‘his mother told me that no one could scry me out as long as I was wearing that talisman. She may well have been right, too. I know that Raena couldn’t find me when I was wearing it.’

‘No more could Jill,’ Dallandra said.

‘Very powerful, then.’ Val considered the lapis egg with a small frown of concentration. ‘Are you telling me that the Mountain Folk have dweomer? Here I always thought they mocked it.’

‘The men do,’ Rori said. ‘The women don’t. What their men think doesn’t matter a cursed lot to dwarven women.’

‘Good for them,’ Val said. ‘But are you sure that the women used dweomer on this stone? They could have come by this some other way, traded for it or the like.’

‘That’s true, but I’d wager it was made right in Lin Serr. When I met her, Othara was ill and blind with sheer old age, but she still reminded me of Jill. You could feel power around her. And the trip down –’ The dragon paused, looking away as he remembered. ‘She lived in the deep city, you see, where visitors weren’t supposed to go. I was still in human form then, of course. So a friend – Garin it was – led me down hooded like a hawk. Once I was good and confused, he let me take off the hood. We went into a cavern where it was lit with blue light, oozing out of the walls. There were some women standing there, waiting to look me over and make sure it was safe to let me through the next doorway. Garin told me that the name of the cavern was the Hall of the Mothers.’ The dragon shuddered. ‘I went cold all over, just hearing it.’

‘That makes me shiver even now,’ Dallandra said.

Valandario nodded her agreement and went on studying the talisman. Dallandra tested the willow water and found it pleasantly warm. She put on her glove, picked up a linen bandage, wrapped it around a big handful of lamb’s wool, then dipped the lump into the water to soak.

‘Lie down again,’ Dalla said to Rori. ‘And remember, it might sting.’

The dragon flopped onto his side, making the ground shudder and the water in the kettle slop back and forth. With her gloved hand, Dallandra laid the wet bandage over the wound and squeezed to let the medicinal seep into the cut. He flinched, then relaxed with a ripple of scales.

‘Much better than itching,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Dallandra glanced at Valandario, who had closed her hand over the talisman and was staring off at the horizon. ‘Val? Are you still with us?’

‘Hmm?’ Valandario looked at her. ‘My apologies. Now, about Haen Marn. Rori, I know that it disappeared. Do you know why, exactly?’

‘It had the best reason in the world. Horsekin. One of their armies was marching straight for it.’

‘I just thought of something.’ Dallandra put the lump of cloth back into the herbwater to refresh. ‘At the time I assumed that the army was heading for Cengarn and that Haen Marn was merely on the way. Do you think they could have been planning to attack the island?’

‘I have no idea,’ Rori said. ‘I never saw them, only the trail they left behind. The tracks started and stopped by dweomer, Raena’s dweomer, or so you told me.’

‘Why bring an army up to the Northlands and then take it away again?’ Valandario sounded puzzled. ‘If they were actually going somewhere else?’

‘No reason at all,’ Rori said. ‘I wonder why Alshandra wanted to destroy Haen Marn?’

‘She may have simply wanted to capture it,’ Dallandra said, ‘though she did tend to destroy the things she coveted. I wonder if Evandar made some prophecy about the island that had to do with Elessario? She was determined to get Elessi back before she could be born.’

‘That was the whole point of the wretched war.’ Rori moved uneasily. ‘Could you put a bit more of that water on the cut? It’s better, but I can feel it still.’

Dallandra fished the sop out of the kettle and went back to work.

‘You’re missing something,’ Valandario said suddenly. ‘Evandar made a prophecy about the island, most assuredly, but it didn’t have anything to do with Elessi. It was about Rori, and the spell book – the vision Ebañy saw in the black crystal.’

‘Of course.’ Dallandra tossed the sop back into the bucket again – the medicinal water had soaked through the glove and her fingertips were turning numb. ‘It’s another hint that the crystal somehow belongs to the island.’

‘More than a hint.’ Val hesitated, then spoke calmly of what must have been painful things. ‘After Jav was murdered, Alshandra appeared to me. She was party to the theft, and that means she must have seen the message in the crystal.’

‘Maybe not.’ Dallandra paused to pull off the wet glove. ‘Evandar most likely locked it against her. Although for all we know, Loddlaen may have been able to see it and tell her.’

‘It seems more and more likely that the crystal’s on that island. So what we need to do, obviously, is bring Haen Marn back.’

‘Obviously, she says.’ Rori’s voice hovered near a growl. ‘And how, my dear Valandario, do you propose to bring it back?’

‘Dweomer, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Rori slapped his tail hard on the ground. ‘Just like that, eh?’

‘Will you stop that?’ Dallandra snapped. ‘The tail banging, I mean. It makes the water in the kettle slop around.’ She knelt down to rummage through her supplies, then brought out a pair of tongs to use instead of the glove.

‘My apologies.’ The dragon sounded less than apologetic.

Valandario once again gazed off at the distant horizon, using the lapis talisman for some sort of scrying or so Dallandra assumed. She used the tongs to fish the sop out of the herbwater and apply it to Rori’s wound. The dragon hissed with a long sigh of relief.

‘The itch is gone, and the sting’s easing up. You’re a marvel with your medicaments, Dalla, you truly are.’

‘My thanks.’

Valandario abruptly turned back to face them again. ‘But about Haen Marn,’ Val said. ‘Is there any chance that this lapis talisman came from there?’

‘No,’ Rori said. ‘I wore it there, and no one remarked upon it. They would have had it been theirs.’

‘I was afraid of that.’ She looked Dallandra’s way. ‘I was hoping that it might be linked to Haen Marn. All I get from it is a very dim impression of a rock vein, probably the one this thing was mined from.’

‘Life’s never that convenient, is it?’ Dallandra shared her regret. A dweomer talisman from the island might have given off a far more useful impression. ‘Rori, you didn’t happen to bring a trinket or suchlike away with you, did you?’

‘I didn’t. Naught except painful memories.’ He began to speak in Deverrian, as he often did when talking of the past. ‘And since it’s gone, I can’t fly off and fetch – hold a moment! I’ve just remembered somewhat. There was a silver horn chained to a rock outside Haen Marn. You could blow it, and it would summon the boatmen. Well, it would if you were meant to visit the island. Now, after the place disappeared, the horn was left behind, but all smashed and tarnished. Still, it must have had some dweomer upon it.’

‘It summoned,’ Valandario pronounced the words carefully. ‘Dalla, its function is to summon.’

‘The moons has horns when it’s new,’ Dallandra said.

‘And silver’s the metal of the moon!’ Val threw both hands in the air and jigged a few dance steps.

Rori growled long and hard. ‘What by the pink arses of the gods are you two talking about?’

‘Some omens, naught more.’ Dallandra turned to him. ‘Where is this horn?’

‘Enj has it, I think.’

‘Enj?’ Dallandra knew she’d heard the name before, but she failed to place it. ‘Who’s Enj?’

‘Angmar’s son, born on Haen Marn. His father was one of the Mountain Folk, but Enj is a fair strange example of them, I’ll tell you. He lives most of the year in the wilderness, out under the sun, and only goes back to Lin Serr for the winter snows.’

‘Very strange, then,’ Valandario said.

‘Well, only half of his mother’s blood came from the Mountain Folk,’ Rori went on. ‘And he was raised above ground on the island.’

‘But he didn’t disappear along with the rest of them?’

‘He wasn’t on the island at the time, Val. He was helping me find Arzosah.’

‘I remember that bit,’ Dallandra said. ‘Rori, can you bring Val that horn?’

‘That depends on Enj. If he’ll part with it, I suppose I could fly hundreds of miles north and figure out a way to carry it and then fly all the way back again.’

‘Well, by the Black Sun!’ Val said. ‘It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.’

‘Naught but scout for our mortal enemies.’ The dragon raised his tail as if to slap the ground, then gently laid it back down. ‘Or have you forgotten the Horsekin?’

‘They’re to the north, aren’t they?’ Val said. ‘Why can’t you do both at once?’

The dragon raised his head and glared at her. Val set her hands on her hips and stared into his eyes until, with a sigh, Rori looked away. ‘Flames and fumes!’ he said. ‘Living around dweomerfolk could drive a man daft and a dragon even dafter.’

‘There, there.’ Dallandra patted his massive jaw. ‘Don’t forget, we’re discussing this in hopes of turning you back into your true form.’

‘Just so,’ Valandario said. ‘Now, if you could fetch me that horn, and if I can heal it so it sounds the dweomer spell again, and if Dalla and I can figure out the correct workings, well, then, we might be able to summon the island.’

‘Exactly.’ Dalla said. ‘And if we actually manage to do all that, then let’s hope that the book does have the instructions for the dragon working in it. You never know with Evandar’s schemes.’

‘True spoken.’ The dragon heaved himself to his feet. ‘That’s the Guardians for you! But well and good then, I’m off to the Northlands. If Arzosah comes looking for me, you’d best not tell her where I’ve gone. I doubt me if she’ll take kindly to the idea of my turning back into a man.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Dallandra felt her stomach clench at the thought of Arzosah in a rage. ‘Um, we’ll ford that river when it’s time to cross. What else can we do?’

With a shrug of wing, the silver dragon waddled off, ridiculously clumsy in the grass. He waddled faster, bunched his muscles, and leapt into the air with a rush of wings like thunder booming, all grace, suddenly, and power, as he soared high and disappeared into the glare of the sun.

As he flew off, Rori was grumbling to himself about the arrogance of dweomerfolk, but soon enough the flying itself soothed him. He loved soaring high above the earth, rising on the wind in splendid freedom, or swooping down only to spiral skyward again. At times, when he glided upon a favouring wind, it seemed to him that the world below was moving while he rested, master of the air.

If he returned to human form, he’d be giving up the power and the freedom of flight. That thought nagged him worse than his wound. And what would he get in return? Hands, he thought. It would be splendid to have hands again, and cooked food, and other such comforts. But those puny comforts could never compensate for the loss.

As he flew over the Melyn River, he considered turning back and telling Dallandra that the effort she would have to make was simply not worth it, that she and Valandario doubtless had more important work to do. What stopped him was the thought of Enj. If naught else, perhaps the two dweomermasters could bring the island back and Enj’s clan with it.

And what of Angmar? Rori asked himself. He’d longed for her return himself, once, a very long time ago now, it seemed to him when he thought about it. He could remember her so clearly, and remember his grief at losing her, but the grief had lost its sting. Missing Angmar, flying north each spring to see if Haen Marn had returned, stopping to speak with Enj – he’d performed these actions faithfully each year for over forty years now, until they’d taken on a distant quality, like a ritual performed by a priest while he merely watched.

Still, for Enj the grief still lived. For the sake of his friend, Rori flew north on Valandario’s errand. He’d bring the horn back, he decided, then return to his scouting. As for the other matter, he would wait and see if it were even possible to walk the earth as a man instead flying so far above it. If it turned out to be possible, he’d make his decision then.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.