The Shadow Isle

‘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.