The Shadow Isle. Katharine Kerr
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