The Shadow Isle

‘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.’