The Shadow Isle

‘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.