The Shadow Isle (2 page)

“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 snakelike head on the end of a long neck lift itself out of the water, but at his shout the beast dove, 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. Cornflower-blue eyes dominated her delicate face. To set off her coloring she wore a finely woven plaid in a blue-and-gray tartan—cloth that Mic the Dwarf had brought home from Din Edin, earned by his trade in gems and jewelry. 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 traveling south soon.”

“He will.” Berwynna’s smile disappeared. “I hate it 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 graying 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 women had been born in the same hour, and they shared the same coloring. 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’ 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 Diarmuid’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 tiptoe 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 gray streaks, and his moustache had gone gray 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 color. A well-favored 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 his family lay asleep, Dougie was still awake, 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.